It Could Happen Here Weekly 186

Summary

Episode Summary: Behind the Bastards – It Could Happen Here Weekly 186

Release Date: June 14, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 186 of "It Could Happen Here," hosted by Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts, the conversation delves deep into the tumultuous situation surrounding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). The episode features an insightful discussion with documentary filmmaker and activist Charles McBride, who provides firsthand accounts of his experiences in the West Bank and Gaza.

The Plight of UNRWA and Palestinian Refugees

[03:11] Lester Holt: "Hello everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James Today, and I'm joined by my friend and yours, Charles McBride..."

Charles McBride recounts his two trips to the West Bank over the past year, noting a significant deterioration in conditions between August of last year and May of this year. He highlights the largest ground operation launched by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) since the Second Intifada, targeting refugee camps such as Tokarim, Nurshams, and Jenin.

[05:08] Charles McBride: "We couldn't even get to those places, not with the UNRWA personnel that we were supposed to go with our documentaries on UNRWA..."

He explains the pivotal role of UNRWA in maintaining the livelihoods of 5.9 million registered Palestinian refugees across the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. Initially established as a temporary relief organization following the 1948 Nakba, UNRWA's mandate was perpetually extended due to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The War on UNRWA

Charles delves into the multifaceted challenges facing UNRWA, emphasizing Israel's persistent efforts to delegitimize and dismantle the agency. He discusses the emergence of the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF), a public-private partnership intended to bypass and replace UNRWA's infrastructure. However, GHF's operations have been marred by violence and inefficiency, leading to tragic incidents such as the deaths of 27 Palestinians during aid distributions.

[10:19] Charles McBride: "Why did it go from something that was set up as a temporary relief organization to, to 77 years later, it is responsible for maintaining the livelihood and well-being of 5.9 million registered Palestinian refugees?"

He underscores the irony of UNRWA's enduring presence, originally intended to be temporary, now being indispensable due to the stalled peace process. The continuous extension of UNRWA's mandate reflects the unresolved nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israeli Policies and International Complicity

The discussion shifts to Israeli societal shifts, where ethnically cleansing Gaza has transitioned from fringe rhetoric to mainstream discourse. Charles cites a poll indicating that 84% of Israelis favor displacing the entire Gaza population—a startling revelation that illustrates the depth of dehumanization against Palestinians.

[12:04] Charles McBride: "UNRWA is probably higher than in the Palestinian Authority. The PA is largely seen as a contractor subcontractor for Israel."

He critiques the international community, particularly the United States, for its inadequate response to Israeli aggression. The lack of political will to halt aid restrictions to Gaza is portrayed as a deliberate move to entrench the humanitarian crisis.

[22:05] Charles McBride: "Every time they're asked about this they go back to, well, we want to get aid to people of Gaza. Unfortunately, Hamas keeps stealing the aid and so we can't allow it."

However, Charles challenges this narrative by pointing out the absence of concrete evidence supporting claims of widespread aid diversion by Hamas. He argues that the real impediment to humanitarian aid is political, not logistical.

Implications for the Future

As UNRWA grapples with budget cuts and operational restrictions, the Palestinian population faces increasing hardships. The dissolution of UNRWA would not only exacerbate the suffering of millions but also empower extremist factions, further destabilizing the region.

[23:26] Charles McBride: "We have enough aid and even aid in the region to feed all those people right now if we needed to."

He calls for urgent state action to halt Israeli aid restrictions, emphasizing that sustained humanitarian efforts could mitigate the ongoing crisis. The episode reinforces the notion that without significant political intervention, the humanitarian situation in Palestine will continue to deteriorate.

Notable Quotes

• Charles McBride [05:08]: "We couldn't even get to those places, not with the UNRWA personnel that we were supposed to go with our documentaries on UNRWA..."

• Charles McBride [10:19]: "Why did it go from something that was set up as a temporary relief organization to, to 77 years later, it is responsible for maintaining the livelihood and well-being of 5.9 million registered Palestinian refugees?"

• Charles McBride [12:04]: "UNRWA is probably higher than in the Palestinian Authority. The PA is largely seen as a contractor subcontractor for Israel."

• Charles McBride [22:05]: "Every time they're asked about this they go back to, well, we want to get aid to people of Gaza. Unfortunately, Hamas keeps stealing the aid and so we can't allow it."

• Charles McBride [23:26]: "We have enough aid and even aid in the region to feed all those people right now if we needed to."

Conclusion

Episode 186 provides a sobering examination of the challenges facing UNRWA and the broader Palestinian refugee community. Through Charles McBride's firsthand experiences and expert analysis, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of the humanitarian crisis perpetuated by political inaction and systemic oppression. The episode underscores the urgent need for international solidarity and decisive action to address the plight of millions of displaced Palestinians.

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For those interested in delving deeper into the subjects discussed, Charles McBride can be followed on social media platforms such as Instagram, Substack, TikTok, and YouTube under his personal account.

Transcript

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One era to the next.

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Evenings on NBC.

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[Tom Brokaw]

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas.

[Lester Holt]

And I'm Matt Rogers and we're the.

[Tom Brokaw]

Host of Las Culturistas.

[Tom Yamas]

It's Pride Month and you know what that means. Friendship parties? Dancing. Correct.

[Bowen Yang]

And do you know what the perfect.

[Tom Yamas]

Thing to bring to any Pride event is?

[Lester Holt]

Bowen, we talked about this.

[Charles McBride]

I'm not a thing.

[Tom Yamas]

Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, Chic.

[Lester Holt]

And honestly, the only other correct answer.

[Tom Yamas]

The Casamigos Margarita during Pride. Now a sleigh.

[Charles McBride]

Ah, Casamigos. Anything is a sleigh.

[Tom Yamas]

Because anything goes with my Casamigos.

[Lester Holt]

Anything goes with my Casamigos.

[Tom Yamas]

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[Tom Yamas]

Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

[Lester Holt]

Hello everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James Today, and I'm joined by my friend and yours, Charles McBride, documentary filmmaker, humanitarian, activist, writer. And you've just been in Palestine, is that right, Charles?

[Charles McBride]

Yeah, just got back like a week and a half ago.

[Lester Holt]

Nice. Welcome. Welcome to America and the free. Damn, that's a rough transition, actually. Thank you for. Thank you for joining us so soon after you got back. So there's a lot to talk about. Right. Like, I feel as if in like, legacy media, when there is less discussion of Palestine recently, maybe just because I'm seeing so much domestic U.S. coverage, like 24 7. Right. We're in another, like, Trump news cycle. But yeah, especially with reference to the west bank actually. Like, can you like, update people on the last. Maybe, you know, maybe in the time you were there and what's. Especially what's happening in the West Bank. So I think that's getting even less coverage or.

[Charles McBride]

So I've taken two trips to the west bank in the past year.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

So August of last year, May of this year, I noticed a rapid deterioration just between those two time periods. So, I mean, it was bad last year when we went. That was right when I was, when my team went there to begin our documentary, they had just launched this new operation in the west bank, which was pretty much the largest ground operation they'd launched, the Israelis had launched since the second intifada. And it was targeted at the northern refugee camps of Tokarim, Nurshams and Jenin. A lot of people know, Janine. They've heard that in the news. You know, it's relatively familiar. Not a lot of people realize that the situation in Tokarem and North Shams is quite similar. And those three camps in particular were targeted by the IDF operation on the second trip. We couldn't even. We couldn't even get to those places, not with the UNRWA personnel that we were supposed to go with our documentaries on unrwa, the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

[Matt Rogers]

Yep.

[Charles McBride]

And last time we were there, they were able to bring us to the camp. They showed us where the Israelis had, you know, bulldozed their facilities and done various airstrikes in the camp. This time they couldn't even take us there. So we went to other camps and said, damn. Everyone's spirits were low. Lots of people were talking about west bank annexation as if it seemed like an inevitability. Yeah, yeah. And I actually spent some time inside 48 on this trip and I went down to Yaffa and to Tel Aviv and interviewed some long time kind of liberal journalists from Haaretz and they were just talking about how the shift in Israeli society over the last year has been quite marked as well, particularly around the question of just generally ethnically cleansing Gaza, which was something that was, according to his telling, like really only heard in very right wing circles, like conist circles over the past, you know, couple decades and is now just pretty routinely heard across the spectrum Israeli society that the best solution to this is to just deport everyone from Gaza.

[Lester Holt]

Damn. Yeah, that's pretty bleak. Like, I mean, I guess the process of manufacturing consent has been pretty, pretty successful and pretty complete in that sense. And like just the dehumanization of Palestinian people has been pretty successful, at least there. I guess if people aren't familiar, we should just like explain that Palestine is. Well, the areas which are now like legally allotted to Palestinians, I guess, are not contiguous. Right. Gaza in the west bank are different areas separated by Israel. And like the bulk of what you have seen in the last two years has been Israel's war on the people of Gaza. But the west bank is a different and larger area which has also seen significant Israeli, like military aggression and violence from settlers. Right. Like paramilitary aggression, I guess you could call it. People, I think maybe will have heard of UNRWA or maybe will at least be familiar with seeing it. Can you explain like what the agency does? It's, it's a unique agency. Right. Like it doesn't work anywhere else in the world. It's quite a unique thing to this Israel, Palestine context.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah. So UNRWA is probably the most controversial UN agency and that has everything to do with the context in which it was founded. It was explicitly set up in coordination between the United States, the newly founded State of Israel, and the Arab League coming to the United nations and presenting a plan to deal with the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians from their home as a result of Nakba in 1948. So out of that context, it's designed as a temporary aid refugee organization. It actually set up before unhcr, so it's mandated specifically for the Palestinians and the Palestinians don't, don't end up falling under UNHCR when it's established. So there's a lot of particularities about UNRWA that make it different from other UN agencies, which is also something that the Israelis like to highlight because they're engaged in a multi decade credibility campaign against unrwa. But to the extent that it is almost entirely staffed by Palestinians, it is quite different than other UN agencies which typically involve multinationals, you know, international personnel. Now, a lot of the higher leadership at UNWRA is still kind of your same international diplomats, but in the words of the Zionist academic that I interviewed for this documentary, most of those have quote, unquote gone native. So most of the, the international diplomats do tend to, you know, obviously be quite sympathetic to the conditions which the Palestinian staff are working under. So my, my documentary is a, it's an investigative documentary to some extent and it uses the frame narrative of the Israeli allegations that UNRA had been infiltrated by Hamas and that UNRWA personnel had taken place in the October 7th massacres. Yeah, it uses that as a hook and a frame narrative to talk about what is this organization?

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

Why did it go from something that was set up as a temporary relief organization to. To 77 years later, it is responsible for maintaining the livelihood and well being of 5.9 million registered Palestinian refugees, not only in the west bank and the Gaza Strip, but also in Syria, in Lebanon and in Jordan. So the politics of it get very hazy very quickly, but it's kind of an inconvenient thing for, for everyone because the organization was explicitly designed to end right after a few years, but the assumption was after a few years there would have been a political resolution. The Israeli Palestinian conflict. There has not been. And here we are 76, 77 years later and we're still at that point. So UNRWA still exists. Yeah. One of the ironic things we found when filming this documentary is that everyone involved in this process wants this organization to go away. Yeah. The Israelis, the Palestinians, the staff themselves. The only thing they disagree on is when and under. Under what conditions? Why?

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, I think it's. Yeah, I know it's very interesting, like as refugee agencies go. Because like, just I was recently reading Sally Hayden's or rereading Sally Hayden's book about refugees in Libya. Right. It's Called My Fourth Time We Drowned. It's an excellent book. If people haven't read it, they should read it. Very good audiobook as well. They incorporate some of the voice notes you got from the refugees, which I think is good. And as is typical of United nations refugee workers in many areas, the bulk of them end up living or spending a lot of time in Tunisia.

[Charles McBride]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

Like not, not in Libya. And coming in like in, you know, the typical image that you see of the United nations is like a bunch of people in white Land Cruisers. Right. And they pull up and they do their thing and they leave. They're not either part of the population or even with the population. And they're often criticized for this around the world. Right. And they're very susceptible to like state narratives. Right. Like in, in Libya, there's, there's, there's all kinds of accusations of corruption or like sort of state capture, I guess. So an agency that's supposed to be international and supposed to be impartial and, and they're supposed to, above all things, advocate for refugees. Right. And sometimes you even see a tension between the IOM and the UNHCR over this kind of shit. It's different with unwra. Right. Like, like they are, from what I've heard from Palestinian friends, like more respected by Palestinian people because of the work that they do and the value that they provide.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah, I mean, I would say, like, trust in UNRA is probably higher than in the Palestinian Authority. The PA is largely seen as a contractor subcontractor for Israel. Right. And UNWRA is seen, you know, as flawed. I mean, there, there are a lot of Palestinians who are deeply critical of unra, particularly the constant efforts it takes to sort of remain neutral on all of these political questions.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

And, you know, inefficiencies that are going to come with any multinational institution, ngo.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, of course.

[Charles McBride]

But in general, they, they seem to, I mean, at this point we've interviewed dozens of people who had various relationships. Either they had gone to UNRWA schools or they had taken, you know, they had been to UNRWA health clinics. And by and large they, they preferred these and they, they saw the value in unrwa. They liked the UNRWA schools, they liked the UNRWA health clinics. UNRWA is largely responsible for the fact that Palestinians are one of the most literate populations in the Middle east and many of them speak English incredibly well. I mean, like, yeah, it's, it's wild talking to an eight or nine year old girl who grew up in A refugee camp. And she's speaking to me in perfect English, talking about how she wants to move to Los Angeles and become an actress. And it's just. It's wild. And that's kind of a testament to what UNR has done. And that's very inconvenient for Israel because when you educate a lot of refugees who can then learn English and turn around and speak to the world in very eloquent ways about the nature of their oppression and their suffering, it becomes an ideological barrier to your particular political project.

[Lester Holt]

Right. And this is one of the things that has distinguished the genocide in Gaza in terms of, like, how it's been perceived in the US at least, right? Is that, like, you have a very literate population that is able to articulate what is happening directly via social media and to traditional media, right. Like to. To people like yourself making documentaries. Like, this is distinct from populations. Like, I think of the Rohingya, right. Like, you know, I speak to Rohinga people pretty often, but I don't think most Americans see Rohingya folks if they go on TikTok or. Or Instagram.

[Charles McBride]

And.

[Lester Holt]

And, you know, as a result, I think people would have cared as deeply. You know, people would have been in the streets for that. But. But that. That communication wasn't there. And yeah, it. It's extremely inconvenient. If. If your project is in an ethnostate, right, and you're willing to cleanse areas of other ethnicities to build your ethnostate in it, which is what's happening, then it's very convenient. If those people you're trying to cleanse can talk to the world in a language that the world understands and very eloquently and make their case for not being ethnically cleansed. Dead. No. It is tribute to the work that Anura has done. You know what I guess we should do? I guess we should take an advertising break right now. So let's do that and we'll come back. All right, we are back. Let's talk about the alternative to unra. Alternative is the wrong word. Let's talk about the attempt to make an end run around UNRES existence by installing this farcical ngo, I guess you could call it an NGO or like, aid provider. This is the Gaza Humanitarian Fund for people who aren't familiar Synthetic.

[Charles McBride]

Onra. UNRA alternatives.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Charles McBride]

This is the substitute.

[Lester Holt]

This is like the Zen of unra, you know? Yeah. Okay, so what. What's going on with the guy? Let's talk about what it is and what it claims to do first, and then we'll talk about how it's not doing it very well at all. Like people are fucking dying in droves.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah. My ally view, UNRWA maintains most of the aid going in and out of Gaza. Everyone I know in the humanitarian world has had to interface at least to some degree with UNRWA during the aid process. And that's difficult because it has essentially been declared a terrorist entity by the Israeli government and has been banned from operating inside what Israel considers to be its territory, including occupied East Jerusalem. And increasingly in the west bank, they're trying to. To limit its operations. And in Gaza, they say they can't work with them because they're Hamas. So it's. The Unhur people are quite confused because they. They've had to deconflict with the Israelis for this entire time. And recently, as a result of this law, it's actually become illegal under Israeli law for the Israelis to like, coordinate with unra. And so the UNRWA people don't have an. Actually, they don't really understand what's going to happen. There's been some limited coordination, but still they. We talked to people who are very high up in the organization and they essentially had no idea what the Israelis were planning to do to replace UNRA or to coordinate with them in Gaza. And so they just kept kind of doing their thing until the Israelis literally made them stop in certain instances.

[Lester Holt]

Right.

[Charles McBride]

You know, my documentary is called the War on unwra, and part of this war has been the propaganda efforts and the Israelis going, going after this organization. And everyone in the humanitarian aid world sort of been asking the question, well, what are you going to do to replace it? This is an organization that deals with like 2 million people in Gaza and like 3 million in the West Bank. Not all of those are registered with unrwa, but it's dealing with all the refugee camps there. And Gaza itself is a refugee camp. Like, it only exists as such as a result of the Nakba, because it's where they put all of the displaced people who weren't in Jordan.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

And so the Israelis basically had their backs against the wall and they're like, okay, well, we have to come up with some alternative to this because we can't come out and say, actually our main goal is to depopulate Gaza and settle it. Yeah, yeah. And so they, they cooked up this idea of the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, which was this public private partnership backed by the Israelis and the Americans. And the intention was to entirely subvert not Only unra, but the entire UN infrastructure that goes into the Gaza Strip. For instance, every UN agency in the world actually piggybacks off of the World Food Program because they're always the first ones in. So it's WFP infrastructure, trucks, you know, vehicles, everything like that that goes in first, and then unhcr, unicef, all those things they're piggybacking, coordinating with wfp. In this instance, WFP is coordinating with unra. The Israelis wanted to not only bypass unra, they wanted to just cut the entire UN system out of that. So to do that, they formed this sort of collaborative partnership under the management of the Israelis, which was supposed to be kind of an amalgam of all of these different private NGOs. And I don't want to get too much into the specifics of, like, who sort of was involved in that, but a lot of people kind of took them at face value. This is. They wanted this to be a real solution, and so they offered to help and kind of set up this system which was supposed to be overseen entirely by the Israelis and the Americans. From a security perspective.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

One of those was Jake Wood, who was the founder of Team Rubicon, which is an organization that does a fair amount of excellent work all around the world. He resigned from the Gaza Humanitarian Fund a day before it launched and went on record saying, we cannot actually do this while keeping to humanitarian principles of humanity and neutrality, which was a signal to the world that this was a highly politicized project, which is precisely what the World Food Program, under the leadership of radical leftist activist Cindy McCain, has been saying about this from the start. And, you know, unra, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of unra, said this is. This is a clearly political event. UN was the only, or the UN system is the only one capable of actually dealing with this in a humanitarian way. All those concerns were brushed aside. American contractors were brought in, and the results were relatively predictable. We've seen at this point, two pseudo massacres. I mean, the first one was four Palestinians were killed. And just this morning, 27 Palestinians were killed at a GHF distribution after gunfire was opened up on them.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, we were recording on the 3rd of June. So that was when this second massacre occurred. And, yeah, like, I mean, just today as we're recording this, I've seen that Boston Consulting Group, again, like, not exactly. Like a bastion of wokeness, has terminated its relationship with the God Humanitarian Foundation. Right. Like, the kind of conceit that this is a replacement for UNRA to begin with was somewhat farcical.

[Bowen Yang]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

But people who were prepared to go along with that, either because they can make money doing it or because they thought this was the only way to stop people starving, are still deciding that having seen the way that this is run, it's not worth it.

[Charles McBride]

Right, right. And there's also some political heavy handedness going on with this. One of the most obvious features being specific aid distribution points in the south of Gaza which are designed to bring, you know, whereas UNRWA and the WFP were going, going to people, they were trying to get food through as much of the Gaza Strip as possible, including people who wanted to return to their homes in the north. The GHF is like, nope, you starving population will need to make the journey to this distribution point and this distribution point only, which, you know, has the political effect of depopulating these areas that, you know, Israel is operating in.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

Which of course is also met criticism. There are some videos going around showing Palestinians celebrating.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

You know, the relief efforts of the, of the ghf. I think some of them have been like verified by Reuters. You know, Israeli media is making hay of that, you know, people praising Trump in Gaza. Right. Which, you know, these people are starving and they're very happy to get aid.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. That doesn't mean that like everything is above board and cool.

[Charles McBride]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

It means that like the people who needed food got food.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah. I mean, and that's the political complexity of the situation is that the people of Gaza have just been abandoned by everyone. Right. I mean there's, there's, there's a lot of criticism to be had of how Hamas has handled this. There's a lot of criticism to be had of obviously the way in which Israel has behaved and the UN system and the international system. So I mean, I'm glad that like some of them are getting food. Yeah. That is, that is an improvement off of none of them getting food. But everyone in the aid world is starting to go on record saying the main problem is Israel preventing aid from going into the Gaza Strip. And actually I want to harp on that a little bit because the reason that has been given primarily for that is that Hamas is stealing the aid.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

Every time they're asked about this they go back to, well, we, we want to get aid to people of Gaza. Unfortunately, Hamas keeps stealing the aid and so we can't allow it. We need to allow just to trickle in.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

That's interesting for two reasons. First of all, they've yet to provide any evidence that that's actually occurring. And second, because all Humanitarian experts agree that even if that was the case, say everything Israel said about Hamas was true and they were stealing, you know, 90, 95% of the aid that's coming in and selling it back. The humanitarian solution to that would be to flood the Strip with so much aid that it would literally be impossible for them to, like, to stop that, which we can't do. Like, yeah, it would be possible for us to flood the Gaza Strip with so much aid that it would be like an abundance of food. So the decision not to do that is a political one.

[Lester Holt]

Yes, definitely. Like I was going to say, on the face of it, it doesn't matter. There are lots of situations, to be clear, where people steal aid. It's undesirable. Of course it is. But, yeah, the solution is more aid. Not like, oh, unfortunately, the aid has been stolen. So now then children must starve.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

That only works if you're prepared to the outcome in which little children die of starvation, which the Israelis are like, they're.

[Charles McBride]

They're perfectly. I mean, yeah. This new was at University of Pen, Pennsylvania poll about saying 84% of Israelis are in favor of the IDF just simply either killing or displacing everyone in the Gaza Strip. 84%.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. It's wild to see, like, it's been such a strange couple of years in that sense.

[Charles McBride]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

Because, like, more people in this country are aware of the plight of the people of Palestine than ever have been, and more people are engaged with it. That is mostly good. Some people have engaged with it in a way which is far from good.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

Like, I don't think there's really very much to be gained. Throwing Molotov cocktails at people in Boulder is not making anything better for anyone. It's just making everything dangerous, more dangerous for everyone, and it's fucking stupid.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah. And I would extend that to gunning down.

[Lester Holt]

So would I. Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

Israeli couples outside the Jewish Museum in D.C. i don't think that's necessarily the best way to help people in Gaza.

[Lester Holt]

No. Like, yeah, standing outside the event for Jewish people and shooting random people. It's not. That's. Again, it doesn't make anyone safer. It makes all of us left safe. And, like, it does nothing to stop people dying and starving in Gaza. And, like, that's. That's not the crux of the problem, I guess. But, like, that is a problem.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

The people are engaging with Gaza, but nothing is helping people here know how bad it is that children are starving in Gaza. But that hasn't changed the fact that Children are starving in Gaza. In fact, like, you know, I've said this a lot of times, like I moved here in 2008 and I had engaged with the movement before that in the uk. Right. And the situation in Palestine, to be clear, was very different then. But like it wasn't something that people had heard of here for the most part. Unless you were within like certain leftist or sort of people of maybe they're like Middle Eastern extraction would know about it. Of course now people do know and all over the world people know and we've seen huge marches, right. Like the situation is worse than it's ever been. I mean, not ever been. The Nakba was pretty fucked too. But as the world looks on, right, like the genocide continues and people continue dying and seemingly the acceptance of the Gaza humanitarian foundation by states of the world is really troubling. Right. Like we're concentrating this starving population in a small area. It's contrary to everything that humanitarian principles stand for. And I don't know, we don't see, I mean there is a very ready alternative. It's whether anyone is willing to step up and tell Israel to stopping aid entering the garden like this could end, at least in my estimation, like very quickly. Right. We have enough aid and even aid in the region to feed all those people right now if we needed to.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's tens of millions of pounds of food rotting in warehouses in Jordan and Egypt right now just waiting to go across the border.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

And people dying.

[Charles McBride]

It's the lack of political will, mostly on behalf of the United States, you know, but also I think the members of the Abraham Accords and the eu. Yeah, it's a devastating indictment. And I think the interesting thing about it is it truly pulls the mask off of the quote, unquote, rules based world order. Yeah, the, the US Led rules based world order. Because you just, I mean, it's just so obvious that no matter how many people want this terrible thing to end, that we're seeing this very obvious genocide is being live streamed to our phones. The powers that be are too invested to, to let it stop. You know, they're, they're into the hill. We've already seen the degree to which the United States is, is compromised in its, in its media and in government storytelling in relation to Israel, Palestine. The long unwillingness of people to speak up about this followed by the very rapid turnaround of people who are now rats fleeing the ship. Yeah, they're seeing the unmistakable reality of this genocide. And you know, it's like everyone says Once this is done, everyone will pretend they were against it from the start. And you're now starting to see that.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Charles McBride]

You know, with like the former White House press secretary.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah, Miller.

[Charles McBride]

Right, yeah. Miller was like, yeah, they've been committing war crimes and they were doing it while I was there, but I didn't speak on my behalf. I was speaking on behalf of the United States government.

[Lester Holt]

Right. Yeah, the old, the old Nuremberg defense. Yeah. They're like, I was just doing my job thing, which, like, it's not actually, not actually an excuse for, for participating in war crimes. And like, should it be an excuse for apologizing or excusing them either.

[Charles McBride]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

It's.

[Charles McBride]

I know that you guys have talked about and won't have spoilers for this, but I know you guys have recently had a series Unpacking Andor, which is my favorite TV show.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

And I was just so happy that they snuck that one line in about when Cyril asks what they're doing here and she just says, following orders.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. How often are we going to hear that in the next few years? I guess.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lester Holt]

It's so predictable. Right? Like every time this happens. Right. Like, and this isn't the first time the United nations has basically allowed a genocide to happen right under its nose.

[Charles McBride]

No.

[Lester Holt]

And, and it will probably won't be the last because as you said. Right. Like the idea that we have a rules based world order, it's a lie. It's a myth that exists to make people feel better and feel like this stuff couldn't happen again. But like, you know, we, we have ICC warrants for people who are traveling freely around the world. It doesn't matter. The ICC can't enforce its own warrants.

[Charles McBride]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

Like, you can say something's a war crime. It doesn't matter. Like, like no one's the end. The war police aren't going to go and arrest all the people doing it.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah, it's mostly just kind of a. Yeah, it's kind of a placebo. I, I'm not really sure what the function it serves. I mean, I, I'm not a big international institutions enjoyer. Like, I'm deeply skeptical of the United nations in almost every one of its aspects. My team and I have talked several times about the point that this documentary has had us weirdly, like, it's improved our trust in, in international NGOs just because we're seeing like, the degree to which UNRA is operating on increasingly less budget every year and still managing to be effective. Yeah, I think a huge Part of that is, again, it is staffed by the local population who are from these areas and they have a duty and a commitment to care to their people. Yeah, but in general, no. I mean, I don't understand what the point of the UN Is if you don't give it the US Military. Like, I mean, if, as an anarchist, I don't believe that this is a great solution to things, but, like, if you wanted to enforce the U. N. You would need the world police. Like, you would need to just use the United States to like, hunt down these people.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

And utilize its 800 military bases in every country to enforce these rules.

[Lester Holt]

And we don't really. Yeah, we. We allow these things to happen. But yeah, I'm not a big. International institutions enjoy it either. Like, I've seen the, um, be fucking useless in most continents that people live on. I would really like it, though, if they would do something to stop the suffering of the people of Palestine. Like, I would. It doesn't mean I wouldn't be happy. It doesn't mean I'm not happy when I speak to guys from PK Gaza who we've had on our show several times. Right. Like, when they talk to us about, like, where should we send money? They'll be like, oh, unreable to get my family some food this week or whatever. Like, I'm happy to hear that.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

I'm glad that they're there. Oh, I'm glad that they were there at that time, I guess. So, like, what is the future hold for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Seems to be falling apart within a very short period of this whole thing being stood up, which is unsurprising. Right. Can you explain, like, what does it take for aid that lives up to basic humanitarian principles to get in there?

[Charles McBride]

I think that's a really difficult question to answer because we have tried so many options.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

I mean, truly. I mean, the last time I think I was on this podcast, it was to talk about my colleagues at the World Central Kitchen who got killed in Gaza. That was an attempt to try and alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people. And it had predictable results. You know, there's all these groups have been operating in there to the extent that they can, and the result has been too little, too late. And. And everyone is saying, from Cindy McCain at the World Food Program to Philippe Lazarini, to, you know, Jose Andres, like, in the. In the. From the private sector, everyone is saying the reason this is a problem has nothing to do with mosques. It has everything to do with the fact that Israel is restricting the amount of egg going to the Gaza Strip. And now everyone's waking up and asking the obvious question of, like, well, why are they actually doing that? And the answer corresponds to those polls we see that indicate that, you know, 50% of Israeli society is open to killing everyone on the Gaza Strip, 84% are open to displacing them all. This is just what Israel wants. And I think the humanitarian world is slowly swallowing that very difficult pill. And I don't. I can't really tell you what comes next outside of a political resolution.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. Which seems harder and harder to come by in the current international climate. Like, certainly it's not coming from the U.S. right?

[Charles McBride]

Like, yeah. I mean, like, something to watch would be that Senator Welch from Vermont introduced a bill to immediately refund unra.

[Lester Holt]

Okay.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

And it has, it has a house, a correlate with, I think. Yeah. Congresswoman Jayapal and a few others who are trying to kind of push that through. I mean, the United States funds $300 million, which is about over a third of unrest annual budget, and we, we've restricted that funding for the past year and a half.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

So if we restore that, I think that would be a big signal to Israel that, like, we're not playing ball anymore. Yeah. I just think when you have a rubber stamp Congress and a fascist president that's probably unlikely to pass.

[Lester Holt]

That's a big reach. Yeah. Yeah. I actually think this is an area where elected officials are to the right of Trump supporters on this one, I think. Like, you know, I spent a lot of time in rural East County San Diego. Right. Like, I talk to people who have very different politics to my own.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

It's a nice way of saying that. But, like, I've had people who straight up, I'm sure voted for Trump be like, man, they're letting little children starve. Like, like, what the fuck is wrong? You know, like, like, I think it's an area where a more sensible politics would be able to build consensus. But here we are.

[Charles McBride]

Right? Yeah. I mean, and there's. There is no opposition. Like, the Democrats are not an opposition party. They're just happy being like, the junior partners in fascism now.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. They're having a little party today where they're giving out tacos because they're trying to somehow encourage Trump to go ahead with more sanctions and tariffs and, I don't know, more genocides, I guess. Like, I don't quite know what the Trump always chickens out. Think, like, what. I'm glad he's chickened out.

[Matt Rogers]

With the terrorists.

[Charles McBride]

Isn't that, isn't that a good thing?

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, like, yeah, like, what are you trying to, what are you trying to say here? I, I think that maybe I don't want to confront what they're trying to say, but this is a thing that, like, at the current time, like, it needs state action to stop it.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

We do not have an organization which, which is able to mobilize people in such a way that they can stop it. Like, and that is, it's really desperate, if you care. Right. Because yeah, the states of the world very clearly, for decades and decades and decades have been unconcerned with Palestinian people and their well being and they're not doing about it now. I think there are still people who are able to make a meaningful benefit to the lives of people in the West Bank. Right. I understand why people are hopeless when they look at what's happening in Gaza and I understand why it seems bleak and it seems like there's nothing you can do. Are there things that, like concrete actions, organizations, groups that you think people can engage with and we've heard from some of them on the show before. Right. To be in solidarity with or to help people in the West Bank.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah. You know, I think, like, honestly, I think there are people who could probably better answer this question for me who've actually gone and done protective presence operations in the West Bank. I know that they're like the people in Masafa Yatta are often asking for foreigners to come and do that. And a lot of people will go through like Jordan Valley solidarity or ism or something like that. I'm usually one to discourage foreigners from jumping feet first into a war zone with great intentions and no knowledge of the language or everything that's going on.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

But there does seem to be a genuine call from amongst the Palestinian community in the west bank to have people who are willing to physically get in between, you know, Palestinian villages and settlers and the idf.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

So that is a concrete thing you can do. That's a dangerous thing to ask somebody to do.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. I don't think it's something people should rush into. Right, right. Like we, we've interviewed people who have been shot doing.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah, exactly.

[Lester Holt]

Young woman was killed doing that.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah. Aisha Naragi. She was, she was shot.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

Feet away from my friend who was just in the west bank and he just got banned from the entire territory for 99 years. And I was talking to him about that because I wonder about like, you know, my work and sometimes I feel like I'M not going far enough in my solidarity because I'm doing this investigative documentary and I'm not physically putting my body on the line.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, sure.

[Charles McBride]

But I can still go to the country. Like my support for the Palestinians is still ongoing. So I think people need to ask themselves, do I want to take one drastic measure to like show my pals? This is my solidarity with Palestine in an instant.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

Whether it's joining like a flotilla that might get airstrikes or you know, setting yourself on fire outside the Israeli embassy, or do I want to like contribute in the ways that I can as best I can. I mean, I'm a storyteller. Right. So I said I need to find a story that I can tell about the Palestinian that will humanize them.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

In the eyes of people who are not naturally sympathetic. And I think a lot of people think that they need to be putting their body on the line. Or it's like, I talk about this with disaster relief all the time. Like disaster happens and people see you on the tv, they're like, I need to be wearing a high vis vest and distributing a box of aid to someone.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

It's like, no, you probably don't actually like, the thing that you can best do to help people is probably the skill that you've been perfecting in your own career as well as like in your own life. Right. If you're good at spreadsheets, you can help people get access to housing.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, a hundred percent.

[Charles McBride]

You know, if you're good, if you're good at lifting things, then maybe you should be lifting boxes. But like I have a friend who's in the award winning director photography and he's like, I have a truck and I, I can lift everything and like show me where to go. And he was hitting me up the entire like first two weeks of the LA fires being like, where should I go? And I was like, mate, you're an Emmy award winning videography. Tell the story of the fires, find the survivors, like bring their stories to life and let the world see what our community looks like. And he did that and it went amazing.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

So like, I think people should think about when they want to help. You know, if you are a ceramicist or you sew or you're a musician, write a song about Gaza. Like there's so many ways to help that. Don't involve physically putting yourself in between a settler in their M4 and a Palestinian family whose language you can't speak.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, I totally agree. Like there's. And we see that with border stuff, right. Like, everyone wants to hike out to the border and drink water or, you know, everyone wanted to in Hukumba, right. Like, a lot of people wanted to help us and people did help us. And it was amazing. It was really beautiful. But, like, people were also able to help the skills they had, like making jewelry and selling it or maybe doing a benefit gig. Right. There's a long tradition of anarchist benefit gigs. Like, it's a thing that we do. Do a zine.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah. Like do a punk concert, you know?

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah. Many, many such cases. Like within doing that, there's the intangible benefit of showing people that people care about them. Like all around the world. I remember, you know, just recently I saw people from the Karani Nationalities Defense Force, right. So one of the revolutionary organizations in Myanmar making a statement about solidarity to the people of Palestine and to their children. And you know that they too have experienced their children being killed. They too have experienced these bombing runs and state oppression and that, like, they see them and they care about them. And even in their own time of war, like the front in Karani State is hot right now, that they are still thinking of the people of Palestine. You know, I saw Palestinian people were very touched by this. Right. Like, it does. Obviously you can't eat someone's good thoughts, but, like, there are things you can do, like, because, yeah, you can't be down there right now giving people a sandwich as much as you'd like to. And for some people, that's either not possible or maybe just not the best use of their time. And like, I think it's a really good message that everyone's good at something you do, like, find the thing that you're good at and use that to help people. I think it's really valuable. Is there anything else you'd like to like to share with people before we finish up here?

[Charles McBride]

Yeah, I just think I would. This was a dark conversation because I don't really see a way out of this humanitarian situation. But I think there's a degree to which that's been the case from the start. Right.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

The real trick of the imperial thought machine is that the. The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

To quote theory twink Charis Nimic. But don't lose hope, right? Because, yeah, the world does care about Palestine more than it ever has. And they feel that the people there feel our love, they feel our solidarity. And that is not valueless. Right. No human is useless who lightens the burden of another. I was Depressed as hell coming back from this recent trip to Palestine. And I went to the mountains and met with a bunch of people who were just really energetic about Palestinian solidarity and.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

And really cared about it. And it was like, yeah, it was so nice to go from that and just be able to tell my Palestinian friends, like, hey, by the way, we just spent an entire week talking about what we can do to alleviate to some small degree, the suffering that your people are going through. That matters.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

Like, every small act, every little thing. Right. The small deeds of ordinary folk, that's what keeps the darkness at bay.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. And that's really prescient. Often, like refugees will say to me, asynaptics will say to me in the last six months now, I guess, that I think Americans don't care about them anymore. And that really fucking breaks my heart, like, more than I can express with words because I care about those people so much. And, like, it does make a difference when they see people doing things and they can be small things, but, like, I know how much that lifts up somebody in dark times. Like. Yeah. Because I've been with them in pretty dark times. So, yeah, it does make a difference. And, like, if that's what you can do, then people shouldn't think it's valueless.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah. And also, I mean, like, pressure people, you know, continue to make people embarrassed for believing in genocide. Call your congressman and remind them that they are. They're shills and cowards. I think a lot about. You know, you mentioned, like, 19. You mentioned World War II earlier. Yeah. I mean, if we had had TikTok in the age of Dachau and Treblinka and Auschwitz, I think about, like, the American government knew about the Final Solution. We knew that the boxcars were going to these. These extermination camps, and we refused to bomb them.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

We focused on military targets. If we've been able to live stream, you know, some from inside Auschwitz, and we. And we were also able, because of ProPublica or whatever, to find out that FDR was choosing not to bomb the concentration camps. There would have been outrage. There would have been a huge amount of outrage, I think, in the American population, as there is in Gaza. And that's an important thing. It's something we have access to now. We can put that external pressure onto people and make them uncomfortable. That's what brought down South African apartheid. It's the BCGs pulling out of the Gaza Humanitarian Fund. Basically, British companies just got so embarrassed to work with South Africa that they just eventually stopped and that's what brought down.

[Lester Holt]

Right? Yeah. And because people would shut the up about it, Right. They wouldn't let them do other stuff and be like, we're not talking about that today. And like people in the case of South Africa wouldn't play sports with South Africa until it fucking stopped doing its apartheid. Right. Like I was going to say, there was global economic boycott. It wasn't quite global. Israel was not boycotting apartheid South Africa. But yeah, that stuff does make a difference. Charles, when's your documentary coming out? Where can people find it? What can they view it on?

[Charles McBride]

I'm still in the editing phase so I think give me two months and I will have a better idea of when it's coming out. I'm hoping like before autumn 2025. It is a timely piece. Right. It has some, some relevance that's time sensitive but you can follow it on, on Instagram. It's just at the war on Unra. Unrwa.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Charles McBride]

And my personal account also posts a lot about it. That's Charles McBride with a Y. And it's the same on substack TikTok YouTube.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. Like Charles said, you don't have to be there getting an M4 pointed at you to make a difference. And so like yeah, I would encourage people to do the little things too. They're not that small actually. But just yeah, the things that aren't going to Palestine necessarily.

[Charles McBride]

Absolutely. Yeah. And like take heart, you know, don't despair.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah. Find some joy.

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[Bowen Yang]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Lester Holt]

Get [e-mail] over the past six years.

[James Stout]

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[Tom Yamas]

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[Tom Yamas]

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[James Stout]

Across the country begging for help with unsolved murders.

[Bowen Yang]

I was calling about the murder of my husband. It's a cold case. I've never found her, and it haunts me to this day.

[Lester Holt]

The murderer is still out there.

[Tom Yamas]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Bowen Yang]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Tom Yamas]

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[James Stout]

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[Matt Rogers]

I've never seen so many women protect predators.

[Lester Holt]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Tom Yamas]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, which, if you are paying attention to the news today, is Los Angeles, not just la, but largely LA right now, which over the course of the last couple of days, while we were off for the weekend, has broken out into a series of protests and cop riots that are kind of consuming national news. The federal government has activated the California National Guard and asserted federal control over them. Governor Newsom is kind of pushing back against that, although not in a way that I am convinced or I've seen any evidence of matters at this point. The United States Marines, a group of, I think about 500 from Camp Pendleton, which is down near San Diego, have been activated as well, which is a probable violation of posse comitatus, although it's kind of unclear to me the extent to which they're in theater at this point. Largely, all of these actions have been ineffective in making the protests go away at this point. What sparked them was a series of ICE raids that took about 2,000 people into custody and brought a bunch of Los Angelenos out in Paramount, California, who were met by the police, the LAPD providing crowd control to Homeland Security, HSI agents. Yeah, and that's the gist of what went down. Things have just kind of escalated from there yesterday, probably four to 6,000 people in the street, as opposed to 500 or so the day before. So things have continued to escalate, and the LAPD and their police have had no real luck in containing the demonstrations. We'll see how long that situation lasts. But, yeah, that's where we are right at this second, more or less. Things are continuing to evolve today. Will have evolved since. Yep.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. By the way, we're recording this on Monday. This will probably be coming out, like, Monday night, Tuesday morning, so who fucking knows what will have happened by then. This is like about 1pm Pacific time when we're recording this. I want to start also by going back to that National Guard deployment, because that national. The federalized National Guard deployment is hideously illegal. Oh, yeah, like unbelievably illegal. Like, I cannot emphasize enough. This is like Constitution shatteringly illegal.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

And the way this is being reported in the media is fucking hideous. They are just straight up lying about it. So, okay, so Trump has not declared the Insurrection act yet, right?

[Tom Yamas]

No, they activated a directive that Trump signed, cited 10 USC 12406, which is a specific provision within Title 10 of the US Code on Armed Services that provision allows, or part of that provision allows for the federal government to deploy National Guard forces, quote, if there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States. So basically, the claim being made by the administration here was that the federalization of the California Guard was justified by the fact that the people of Los Angeles, which at the point this was done, was somewhere less than a thousand.

[Bowen Yang]

Of them, 500 people. Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

Had. Were an open rebellion because they had yelled at a bunch of ICE officers for a while. That was the. The situation.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. Well, and also. But it's worth noting, too, even. Even. Even if there was a rebellion, which there isn't, he also can't use that section because it's in coordination with the governor. You can only do it if the governor is working with you. And the governor, like, Newsom is being a real piece of shit about this. For, again, like, the president.

[Tom Yamas]

The LAPD's been.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, the LAPD. Yeah. But it's like he's been sending the LAPD out, but he hasn't given permission for the federal government to, like, use the California National Guard. They're just doing it. Right? This is like, they've just stolen a state National Guard. And newsroom's response has been, because he fucking hates protesters so much, has been like, oh, this is bad. Am I gonna, like, do anything about the fact that, like, again, every single law about how the National Guard is supposed to be used has just been torn the fuck up? No. Like, fucking NPR and, like, a bunch of the mainstream media reporting about this has just been saying that, oh, well, he used this provision. And it's like, no, he didn't. Like, he did not. He explicitly. Every single part of the thing that lets you use this provision, none of the conditions have been fulfilled, which means he's not using it. He's just saying shit and doing it.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah, that's exactly right. And the activation of the US Marines is based on, like, Hegseth posted a tweet being like, I've got Marines ready in Camp Pendleton, which, like, there's absolutely no constitutional justification for.

[Bowen Yang]

No.

[Tom Yamas]

Especially since the National Guard had just been put in for deploying active duty US Marines into this situation.

[Bowen Yang]

Absolutely not.

[Tom Yamas]

It's all super. Like. For one thing, the situation that they're in right now in terms of, like, what we've seen from the National Guard yesterday was like, they're not very effective at this.

[Bowen Yang]

No, no.

[Tom Yamas]

Right. They. They, fairly quickly, after being deployed, started using, you know, firing impact munitions at. At the Crowd attacking the crowd in the same way that the LAPD had done nothing. That was like, I would say, an escalation beyond how the fucking cops were active. Right. But National Guard is bad at handling these kind of things. Right. Their force organization is not meant to be able to be split up into small enough units the way the cops are in enough areas. Like, they're. They're just not meant for this sort of thing. It's not how they're, like, meant to be deployed to counteract protests. So you wind up just kind of keeping them in this big blob of guys who you don't have good. Like they're sleeping on floors in government buildings right now. Because the quartering act exists.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. Which is amazing.

[Tom Yamas]

And because there's not much in the way of organization behind deploying them. And they don't know. They're not. I mean, neither are the police generally well trained with their impact munitions. But these guys certainly aren't. And they freak out at the drop of a hat. Like, they're, like, worse at it than the lapd. And the LAPD is, you know, not good at it. They're just good at hurting people. So you've just kind of got this large, brittle group of guys who you can plunk down in an area while protesters continue to gather in groups all around the city. And the more stories of, like, a blob of National Guardsmen up protesters you get, the more people are coming out and the less controllable the situation becomes. Comes.

[Bowen Yang]

And it seems like we're seeing the very beginning stages of people actually learning tactical lessons from 2020 and 2020. In 2024, with the. The Palestine encampments.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

Which is that like. Yeah. Like, if you concentrate all of your people in one spot, police departments are very, very good at massing a whole bunch of people and rolling you over. And we've known this since 2020. If you are at a whole bunch of different spots at the same time, they're terrible at responding to that. And that's kind of what's been happening. Yeah, there's been a bunch of protests popping up in different places. It's been very effective at sort of like preventing that kind of like one giant sweep. Mobilizations that were, like, destroying the student encampments.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. And I'm looking at. Based on reporting from CBS News, about 700 U.S. marines have been activated from the 29 Palms base near San Diego, which is, per Jim Laporta, who's a defense reporter widely considered to be one of the worst bases to be stationed at, in the entire military are being deployed to Los Angeles right now. So that's just great.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. Someone asked Trump what would it take for him to use to like authorize the deployment of the US Military on American soil. And he said that's just, that's up to me. Which is not how any of this works. Like, that's just pure military dictatorship stuff. If Trump is just able to like use the military, just do whatever the fuck he wants, that is just, that is the Constitution gone. That is the pretense of democracy gone. It is real bad. Now it hasn't happened yet, but there has been a bunch of extremely alarming other shit that's happened. So the cops arrested the president of California seiu, which is the service workers union in California. Very, very large union. Not a super billitant one.

[Lester Holt]

No.

[Tom Yamas]

And David Huerta isn't who you'd call like a particularly militant leftist.

[Bowen Yang]

No, he's just like, he's just like a kind of like a Democratic Party labor guy. And they just like arrested him. Him outside of, outside of one of the, the initial protests where he was.

[Tom Yamas]

Injured him quite badly too.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, yeah, like beat the shit out of him. And then he's still being held in, in, in, in a federal detention building. They're, they're, they're charging him with a, with federal felony conspiracy to impede an officer. And again, this is, this is the, this is the head of like one of the largest unions in California.

[Tom Yamas]

No. And they're, they're justifying it in part based on the charging documents because they saw him texting on his phone outside and assumed he was texting to like a protester to give them orders.

[Bowen Yang]

Right. Like it's like fucking cartoon clown shit. But like the actual effect of this again is that they have like one of the, they have like the president of one of the largest unions in the state, like, yes, in a federal detention building. So I mean, there's obviously been like, unions are pissed about it. There hasn't been any kind of large scale mobilization from them yet. But if there was one possible thing you could do to actually get SEIU off its ass and like show up to shit, it's this. We don't know exactly what's going to happen. The reporting that I've seen so far has suggested that there is actually a kind of heartening degree of cross union support for like, holy shit, the feds, like just grabbing the president of a union is in fact bad. We're gonna have to see exactly how that plays out, but, like, he's still fucking in there. Maxine Walters, like, tried to enter the facility to check on him. This has happened with a bunch of different congresspeople who have tried to enter. This one in LA and a couple of other detention facilities. They are all being denied, which is unhinged.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. Especially since they have oversight over facilities like this. Yeah. Other news from today that's just come out. In the last less than a day, the government has deployed MQ9 reapers, I think at least two of them, over Los Angeles. These are the drones that are. That we were using overseas to shoot Hellfire missiles at people. That's not what they're being used for here. They're being used for surveillance. The last time this was done was in Minneapolis in 2020.

[Bowen Yang]

Yep.

[Tom Yamas]

Outside of their use for surveillance over the border, but there's MQ9s over an American city surveilling protesters. Speaking of that, there's also just been, like, the threat of surveillance being used against protesters. Kind of the most chilling example from yesterday was an LAPD helicopter flying low over a crowd, shining a spotlight on them and saying, like, I've seen. We can see all of you. We're going to come. I'm going to come to your houses later. Like, you're all on camera, and I'm like, specifically, I'm going to cut. We're coming to your houses later.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, it's police state shit.

[Tom Yamas]

Like, yeah, it's police state shit. Now, do I believe that they actually have the ability to. No, they don't actually. But, yeah, that said, like, where.

[Bowen Yang]

If you're going to one of these protests. Wear a fucking mask.

[Tom Yamas]

Yes.

[Bowen Yang]

Like, I don't know, like, both for Covid, but, like, also. Jesus fucking Christ. Like, they're flying Predator Troats over these protests. Like, wear masks. Good Lord. Do you know what else wants you to buy masks?

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast, perhaps. And we're back.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. So I also want to talk a bit about the specific conditions that caused all of this stuff, because I think the reporting on it has been really bad. So there were. There were 2,000 arrests from ICE on Tuesday. They arrested 2,000 people on Wednesday. I think these are, like, national numbers. The numbers, like, very specifically in LA is at least several hundred people have been being held in just horrifying conditions. You know, some of them are being held in federal detention centers, but they're also just being held in, like, the base of these fucking buildings because there's not enough room to hold this many people. You know, I mean, even the conditions in the regular detention center are terrible. But, like, the immigration lawyers who people were able to reach and talk to are talking about hundreds of people in rooms designed for 30. There's no cots, they're sleeping on the ground. Sickness is spreading. There's not enough food or water. Conditions are fucking horrifying. A lot of the people who are in there, you know, the ones that we've been able to get any kind of contact with from their lawyers, a lot of these people cannot be deported because they are people who have been granted stay of deportation by the US Government, which means they cannot be deported, but ICE has just fucking kidnapped them anyways. There's videos you can see from the protesters outside the buildings. And there's something I Remember from Occupy ICE in 2018 that's just fucking harrowing, is that, like, when you're outside these buildings, sometimes you can hear the people inside shouting, and it's fucking harrowing. And with these ones, there's a bunch of videos. If you can see that the people inside the buildings are trying to, like, shine lights out of windows so that people know that they're inside, it's fucking horrifying. And I, and I think just how bad this is, like, how bad it was that, like, all of these fucking people in their fucking tanks just rolled up and started kidnapping people, has just kind of been lost in all of this discourse about the protest. It's like, no, this is what was happening. Like, this is straight up. Soldiers are just taking people in the night. Like, that's what this is.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

You know, and this has been happening all over. There was also a huge sort of protest sort of started at this Home Depot where. Okay, so this is where. This is where we get into the point where, like, it's kind of difficult to see what's going on. ICE claims that they were just staging a bunch of people. The Department of Homeland Security said to the BBC that there was no raid on this Home Depot plant and that they were just staging there. I don't believe that, because these people lie for a living. It is their job. They are police. It is their job as a cop to lie to you. It is a constitutionally protected thing that they have according to the Supreme Court, which is absolutely ridiculous, but I am pretty sure they're lying about that. But regardless, there's, you know, like, their approaches started up and then, like, the cops just started tear gassing the people who were protesting.

[Tom Yamas]

Yep.

[Bowen Yang]

This massive rage at. At a Home Depot.

[Tom Yamas]

Now there was a. Another Kind of noteworthy event is when ICE showed up, up in force. They got. There were kind of two different actions. There was one down at a federal building where people attacked and disassembled barricades at the same time as people showed up to go after the ICE caravan. ICE officers were pelted in their vehicles with a number of objects. And again, this is the kind of thing that, like, makes it a lot more difficult. I mean, that just appears operational operationally to be true. For them to crack down when they're. When they're expecting, you know, action in one direction and it comes in multiple at the same time.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

There was another instance earlier in the protest where ICE officers were surrounded by a crowd and cut off for about eight hours while the LAPD refused to respond to them. And they eventually had to land a Blackhawk on the street in order to resupply because they were out of, like, water and I think running low on munitions, which they then used with reckless abandon.

[Bowen Yang]

Yep.

[Tom Yamas]

So. Yep. Yeah. There's also, as I'm looking right now, just about as about two hours ago, a US Marine AH1Z Viper attack helicopter was filmed flying low over Los Angeles. So it looks like we've got active duty U.S. marine Corps forces in the city. Unclear if they're directly engaging with anyone. I haven't really heard of a lot of activity today, but, yeah, yeah, my.

[Bowen Yang]

Guess is things will intensify, you know, as. As the day goes on and as we sort of roll into night. Because as some people sort of start getting off work and when temperatures start.

[Tom Yamas]

Coming down a bit, that's the open question. Right, as to, like, what's going to happen. The last couple of days we saw numbers escalate, but now it's Monday. People have work and there's more. It's like, it's not clear to me that that's going to happen, that this is going to be like a. Yeah, we'll see. I'm seeing a lot of early comparisons to 2020, and it's not clear to me that that's going to happen. One thing to note is that kind of at the top, so far we've had four to six thousand people out in the street in la.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, it's not.

[Tom Yamas]

Which is not, you know, compared to 2020 numbers. And while we've seen some sympathy demonstrations, I mean, here in Portland, I don't think it got larger than 40 or so people. There was another, you know, somewhere less than a hundred people in San Francisco that some. A good chunk of whom got kettled the other day, but not, not mass demonstrations yet in other cities.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, yeah. It hasn't, it hasn't like really kicked off everywhere yet. That. And it's also interesting because these protests are kind of coming off of the back of a couple of scattered things. We talked about this on Executive Disorder, but there was a very big confrontation in Minneapolis last week. There's another one in Chicago where they attacked a bunch of Chicago aldermen, which was a time the way it's been going is you get a giant raid and it pisses people off and there's a flare up, up. And the flare ups have been getting larger, but it hasn't been like a sustained thing. It's largely been reactive to, to these kind of large raids. And, you know, that's not necessarily like the recipe for a sustained thing. However, comma, the Trump administration, their target goal for the number of arrests a day is 3,000. So like, they're trying to intensify the, the number of rage they're doing and how sort of like, like aggressive and like, militant they are. And I think that might be a thing that causes this to accelerate as we go as we head into like, next weekend.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

Because if they're still doing this, right. Like, if feds are, if suddenly like, like hundreds of feds are in Chicago again and they're like grabbing people out of like, Logan Square. Right. Or, you know, they're, they're trying, they're doing this in like, in New York. They're doing this in, in like, other places. I think it could start to escalate, but right now it's still very much unclear.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. I mean, and that's where I stand too, on this is like, I don't actually know what's going to happen with this demonstration. But I think that, you know, one possibility is certainly that this continues to escalate and that you just get more and more people out consistently. The other is that it kind of peters out from this point. If it continues to escalate, then the, the state is. Or the, the feds are in a situation where, where they have committed to continuing the escalation chain and there's not much for them to go once they've got active duty soldiers in the streets, but just actually shooting at people with live rounds.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

Assuming that they can't stop the demonstrations with a show of force. And likewise, there's not much else for people to do but either back down and stop coming out, at which point the administration will take a victory lap and say that, like, look, this Works and this will become their, their standard go to whenever a city erupts is immediately nationalize the, the state National Guard.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

Bring out life troops. Right. That's, that's what will happen everywhere. That's going to become the new norm.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

Or people will continue escalating and. Yeah. Like in that case, the situation is like, do people escalate to deploying more force? Do they have that real option? Right. Or does the kind of stress of responding with that sort of force largely with soldiers, that this is not the primary thing they signed up to do? Do they start like stop obeying orders? You know, these are the kind of things that we would then.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

Be looking at to see. Right. Like that's, that's kind of where there's a couple of different places it can go from here. You know, another possibility is that like, if we see an instance of like, okay, in order to try and crack down on this, they authorize the use of deadly force against a chunk of demonstrators and people get killed.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

Then do you see it? This kind of thing erupt in cities all around the country like we saw in 2020. Right.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

In which case again, things get very. Because there's not, there's not a lot of the US army, really.

[Bowen Yang]

No.

[Tom Yamas]

There are a lot of cops, but compared to the US Population, there's not even that many cops. Right. And widespread enough dissent like this, you know, would force some very difficult decisions from the, the, the federal government and from the administration. Right. And, and that's kind of our best case scenario is that you get enough people out in enough cities that like, it is just crashing the US Economy. Right.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

Like, and there's, there's no real way to lock down the unrest and you start getting National Guard refusing to respond to deployment orders as well as active duty soldiers, like refusing to respond. Right. Like, these are, these are the kind, that's the kind of thing that we're looking at in terms of like a potential best case scenario here. I don't know where things are going to head. I think maybe a likelier possibility is not that we hit that, that situation right now, but that we start to see like as this kind of peters out, the administration puts out a victory lap and then we start to see, you know, demonstrations responding in other cities and maybe there's kind of a slower tempo of escalation here. But I don't know. I want to say that my hope is that they overplayed their hands here, but I just don't know that that's clear in part because we haven't seen the scale of mobilization by people that is clearly going to be impossible for them to respond to. Right.

[Bowen Yang]

I am still expecting that we're going to get a really large escalating series of protests this summer. It's June. You can tell how I am. It is June 9th as we're recording this. Right. It is going to be a long, hot summer. Right. Regardless of whether this is the one or whether it peters out here, I think it is absolutely possible that this peters out and this isn't the one. I don't think it's very likely that this peters out. The Republicans take a victory lap and then we don't get more protests this summer.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

At this scale or larger. Yeah. I think. I think that's very unlikely. You. We should take an ab break and then I want to talk a little bit about some of the tactics we've been seeing, because they're very funny.

[Lester Holt]

Ah.

[Tom Yamas]

And we're back. I should probably note very quickly that, like, obviously one thing that happens when, like, this goes down is that you get people posting on the Internet their thoughts about this. One of the more prominent posters on Twitter in the new Musk era has been the menswear guy who made a couple of statements that I don't entirely agree with about, like, I mean, in general support for protests, but, like, I don't support, you know, violent protests. What I would call some kind of misinterpretations of the civil rights movement, but also, like, not something I would. I don't, I don't care that much if people are wrong on the Internet.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, I mean, he, he did have a, a straight up poster meltdown where he was like, yelling about someone's, like, breakup to say that they're insufficiently dev voted because they didn't stay with this person to, like, keep them in the country. There is meltdown bay. But, like, what matters?

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah, people, People melt down posters. Meltdown. What, what I think what matters is that, like, he. He made a post later, a longer one, talking about the fact that he was undocumented. His family was undocumented because, you know, they came to initially Canada after the Tet offensive and entered the US Through a porous border and talking about the way in which being undocumented has, like, affected his entire life. And now the vice president.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

And the DHS account put us in a picture of like, Spy Kids of a kid with like, a little, like, computer tracker thing on his eye. And J.D. vance made a post being like, basically we're going to deport the menswear guy for his posts.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. Which is fucking hideous.

[Lester Holt]

Which is.

[Tom Yamas]

It's just like again, another example of the ridiculous level of government repression that we're looking at here. Like where the federal government is like targeting themselves based on posts that make people angry.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. And. Well, specifically post on Twitter too. Like. And like that's also an important thing of like, if you're not on Twitter, it is harder to get the eye of the state on you. If you are on Twitter.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

Like the vice president can be posting fucking unhinged reply images to someone talking about deporting you. Like, Jesus fucking Christ.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

Is a. Is a horrifying level of repression. The sort of mirror to. This is the stuff we've been seeing on the ground. Right. There's a video going around of a like a pretty right wing Australian journalist who's just like talking about the protests.

[Tom Yamas]

And like maybe 20ft, her back turned to a police riot line.

[Bowen Yang]

It's more like 15. The guy in like the end of the riot line just like turns and.

[Tom Yamas]

Shoots her very casually. No protesters close to her. Absolutely no question.

[Bowen Yang]

No.

[Tom Yamas]

No chance that he was aiming at someone else. Zero chance. No chance that he thought that she was attacking him. Just shot a lady in the back of her thigh with an impact mutation for no reason.

[Matt Rogers]

It.

[Bowen Yang]

The most unhinged part of this. Well, okay, the most unhinged part of this was that they fucking did this. The second most unhinged part of it was that her fucking like her fucking outlet in the description of the video said that they appeared to be targeting Crossfire. Like appeared to be targeting a protesters. Like, no, they weren't. There's this really amazing thing with the American press where like they are incapable of objectively describing the thing that a cop does because if they describe the thing that the cop does, it looks.

[Tom Yamas]

Like like anti police, but everyone can see. Yeah, yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

And so they have to just lie about it and be like, oh, it's Colin the crusher's. Like, no, with your own eyes you can see that the headline is lying.

[Tom Yamas]

This is not questionable. This is not an arguable point. This is not debatable. No, the footage is objective and obvious.

[Bowen Yang]

You can watch the video.

[Tom Yamas]

It's like, okay, guys, he just shot her because he wanted to, because he thought it was funny. Like that's why he did it. We know.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. And like this kind of shit just continues to happen. Like the press has Learned nothing from 2020. They're still doing all the stupid Sonography shit. There's actually been shit the cops have done in this protest that I've never actually seen before, which is a new one, because, like, by the time I was, like. I was like a few weeks in 2020, I had seen basically everything. Right. Like, I've been doing this for, like, fucking ages. I've seen the cops trample people with horses before. I had never seen them trample a guy and beat him with the same person on a horse.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

Beating a guy and trampling them with the horse at the same time. That's a new one. Good fucking God. That's also. And I think. Is this worth understanding? Is that, like, that is the point of police horses. The reason they have them is so they can trample people with them.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. It's to run people over with them. Yes.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. And it's real fucking bad. That's hideous. And shit like, this has been happening this whole time. There's been a bunch of journalists who've been really severely injured by impact munitions already.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. One guy got shot in this. A skull. You can tell it's a 40 millimeter round because of the indent that left in his skull.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. Those things are like the size of your fist and they just.

[Tom Yamas]

They're massive. And they're not even meant to be fired directly. When you're shooting at people, you're supposed to shoot them up at the ground and bounce them into people.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. Now, no cop has ever done this.

[Tom Yamas]

They don't use them that way. I've had them used on me, like. I'm sorry. Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

This munition has never been used like, that single time in a history.

[Tom Yamas]

And that's the general truth of riot munitions. And actually, I don't know if this guy was shooting, shot with a. With a. With a rubber round or a foam round. I think they probably shot him with a grenade, which you're also not supposed to shoot at people, but again, they do all the time, which also kills people a lot. Guy very nearly died in Portland a few years back from that. Only his bike helmet saved him. Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. Like, this is. This is a. This is one of the most common ways people get killed in protests is by the cops shooting them.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

Like tear gas. Ganges specifically. Especially, like in Turkey. This was a huge thing. Like a bunch of people got killed by. By getting hit with tear gas canisters.

[Tom Yamas]

Yep.

[Bowen Yang]

However, comma, there has been a bunch of extremely funny and, like, pretty effective tactics people have been using. One of which I've never seen before. That is fascinating. Is people were calling Wymos, which are these like driverless taxis.

[Tom Yamas]

Yes.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. And so they would use the app to call WI mos to places they wanted to set up roadblocks to stop police cars going through and stop ICE cars going through, and then they would light them on fire. And they did this to so many of these cars that the LAPD called Wine and told them to shut it down because they were like, literally, it's a self driving flaming barricade.

[Tom Yamas]

Well, and I think white people were doing it is in part because like, they like the word started spreading that like the police were getting footage from Wymo. Right.

[Bowen Yang]

Yep, yep, yep.

[Tom Yamas]

So they were like, well, these are surveillance machines and yeah, if you, if they show up, you light one on fire and there's this flaming barricade. Yeah, yep.

[Bowen Yang]

And then, and then people figured out that you could just like, oh, we could just bring these to places like this. This is a self deploying flaming barricade.

[Tom Yamas]

Ye. Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

And.

[Bowen Yang]

And the other thing that, that's interesting about it too is it's another one of these examples that you see in protests of like, people have this tendency to think of riots as these like, really spontaneous things that nobody's like, thinking about a lot. But the thing about why Mose is that like, if you've like walked in a city that has these things, these things have tried to run you over at least once.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

Like, there's, there's a surveillance angle. There's also the angle that these things are trying to fucking kill you all the time. And so, and this is like, you know, this is a very common like, like first thing that happens in the riot is like people burn down the thing that has been trying to fucking kill them this whole time.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

And so this is this one, except they figured out how to turn it into flaming car barricades.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. So I don't know, I guess we should end this with assuming things do kind of get. Get bigger or assuming things get bigger later.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

And you're watching this and either you head out soon and wind up, you know, being at a protest or that happens later. There's a couple of things to keep in mind. One of them is, especially as we hit the summer, there's always trade offs when we talk about like different kinds of body armor that you may or may not want to have. Right. You know, the two broad types are soft ballistic armor and hard ballistic armor. When we talk about like ballistic body armor that can, that is resistant to bullets. The downsides to both of Those are expenses. No reliable body armor. And I'm talking about NIJ certified body armor, which you should always shoot for. None of that is ever cheap. Some is cheaper than others. Soft body armor is really all you need for riot munitions. It doesn't stop the pain as much as hard body armor. I've been hit in hard body armor by impact munitions by like foam rounds and stuff and barely felt it. Whereas being hit with them in soft armor is still pretty painful. However, hard body armor armor, like the stuff that stops rifle rounds, can shatter when hit by impact munitions. And again, because it's a significant expense, means you might not have that hard body armor anymore. The other thing to keep in count is that when you're talking about like armor for your body, if you're, if you're worried primarily about impact munitions, it doesn't have to be ballistic stuff like football pads, hockey pads works very well against soft munitions. Right. Again, there's a huge trade off and potentially a safety trade off. If it's 110 degrees where you are like the danger of wearing any body armor and how much it slows you down and how you know the odds of it causing you to have heat stroke or whatever.

[Bowen Yang]

Yes.

[Tom Yamas]

Can be significantly higher than like whatever you'd gain in protection. However, there are some things you should never go into a situation like this without. In terms of armor. One of those is a helmet. Again, there are ballistic helmets that are resistant to pistol rounds. There are no helmets that exist that will reliably stop rifle rounds at by close range. With a rifle, we're talking within a couple hundred meters, right? Those don't exist. Yeah, they can stop maybe a ricochet or a glancing blow. They're good for shrapnel, they're good for pistols. That's, that's what helmet ballistic helmets are for. And those are great for police riot routes. A ballistic helmet is a really good thing to have if they are shooting rubber rounds or shooting grenades directly at people. It is not, however, the only thing you need or the only thing that could provide safety. It's not ideal to have like a bump helmet or a bike helmet as opposed to a ballistic helmet or like a bike helmet as opposed to a bump helmet helmet. These are different things. A bump helmet is higher rated than like a standard bike helmet. A motorcycle helmet is also pretty robust. A bumper. A motorcycle helmet is better to have if you're being shot at with non lethal or less than lethal, whatever you want to call ammunitions. But all of those, any kind of helmet is better Than your bare skull when police are shooting into a craft. So wear something, even if it's a $10 bicycle helmet. Helmet. If that's all you can get, wear that. Don't go into a situation like this without a helmet. Bring something like a camelback or whatever that you can have on your back and drink water from regularly. As well as bottles of water that you can use to wash out tear gas. Only use water to wash out tear gas. Only watery water. And if you catch people being like milk works, tell them you are wrong. Don't use milk.

[Bowen Yang]

No fresh friends, comrades, lovers for your family.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

He can be the generation that stops using milk for tear gas. You can do this.

[Tom Yamas]

You don't need to make cheese in your eyes.

[Tom Brokaw]

Only you can prevent people.

[Tom Yamas]

For the love of God. It doesn't work. And if somebody starts talking about. Well, no, you know, actually it's just like if you eat something spicy and it'll come. No, no, no, no, no. None of that's right. I'm telling you, none of that's right. Now some people do use something called law, which is like a mixture of. I think it's an anti or something like that. I forget exactly what's in law. And yeah, that can be effective, but don't use it. Just use water. Use water. Use water.

[Bowen Yang]

No, just.

[Tom Yamas]

Just use water. If you are. If you have some degree of like professional medical treatment and you decide law is better, do whatever you want, doctor. Right, but like, don't you listening? Use water. Water, right, Just water.

[Lester Holt]

Water.

[Bowen Yang]

Look, melt the ice into water. Only use the water on your eyes.

[Tom Yamas]

Clean water. Ideally from something like it's anyway, whatever when it comes to mace. Water eventually will get mace out. Mace is way different from tear gas. Tear gas with water you can be back to functional in a couple of minutes. Right? If you wash your eyes out. I've been tear gas like 200 times and I'll tell you, it never takes that long to get your eyes functional again. Assuming. The other thing you want to note is that if you're going into a tear gas situation, if you wear contacts, don't. Glasses only, right? Because you do not want to have mace or tear gas in your eyes. When you have contacts, it can cause permanent debilitating damage, right? They may need to surgically remove your contacts. Wear your goddamn glasses. You can. And I have worn contacts with like a full face respirator or a full face gas mask. But there are still dangers there, including that if you are wearing a full face mask or a gas mask or Something like that, and the police catch you, they will pull that up and mace you underneath your mask. It's happened to a bunch of people I know. And if you're wearing contacts under there, you can get in very bad shape. There are easy ways to make glasses holders if you've got a spare pair of lenses inside a mask like that. Anyway, the other thing to note is that mace is not the same as tear gas. Mace you up for much longer, you are going to be out of commission for at least probably 20 to 30 minutes with, with Mace. In the best case scenario, enough water will eventually wash out mace, right? It will eventually deal with it, but not on any kind of short time frame, right? It's going to take you a while to get enough mace out of your eyes that way. Ideally, you get to a place where you have access to something like a faucet or a hose. And you use dawn dish soap is the best thing to use. That's going to remove the surface thing. There's a better thing for this, but I'm talking about if you don't have access to specialized things or like baby shampoo, right, Something like that, that ideally dish soap. Next would be something like a baby shampoo, right? With, with a good amount of water. Now, the very best thing for Mace is a specific wipe that's made to be used for this. This does also help for tear gas. It's called Sudacon wipes. S U D E C O N. You can buy it off of Amazon right now. They're not expensive. You can carry a couple of packs. You generally want to like, take what's in there in two different pieces and use one to kind of wipe away from your eyes and then the other to clean your face up afterwards once you've removed the bulk of the material. Real Sudacon wipes are the best thing to use with Mace anyway. That's a quick and dirty guide to what, what kind of stuff is useful for this. And as always, water, Water, Water.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. And the, the one last thing I want to add is that there, there is, there is one more scourge that you can end in this generation. Stop getting kettled on bridges. I swear to God, don't cross the bridge. Do not, not. Don't be like. My action is we're going to hold a bridge every single time there's one of these goddamn protests. Like 10,000 people get arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge. It happens every time. The thing with bridges is that if the police cut off both ends, you are now stuck on the bridge. Don't go onto the bridge. Simply do not. Like, I'm not even going to give. Normally the speech that I give here is about like, oh well, if you're on a bridge, make sure you can hold one side of it so you have. No, no, no, no, no, fuck that. No bridges. Don't go on bridges. We can stop. As a society, we have the technology to don't get kettled on a bridge. It is so fucking easy. You simply don't go on the bridge.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. Okay. And that's, that's the episode for today. Everybody use water.

[Bowen Yang]

Don't get kettled on bridges.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. Good luck everyone. Good luck.

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[Bowen Yang]

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[Charles McBride]

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[Bowen Yang]

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[Charles McBride]

Your purchases have enabled Ford and Ford dealers to donate billions to communities.

[Matt Rogers]

This June, celebrate Ford and Ford dealers.

[Charles McBride]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Bowen Yang]

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[Charles McBride]

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[Matt Rogers]

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[Lester Holt]

Through 2024 cy over the past six.

[James Stout]

Years of making my true crime podcast.

[Tom Yamas]

Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing.

[James Stout]

No town is too small for murder.

[Lester Holt]

I'm Katherine Townsend.

[Tom Yamas]

I've received hundreds of messages from people.

[James Stout]

Across the country begging for help with unsolved murders.

[Bowen Yang]

I was calling about the murder of my husband. It's a cold case. They've never found her and it haunts me to this day.

[Lester Holt]

The murderer is still out there.

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[Lester Holt]

I dig into a new case, bringing.

[James Stout]

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[Tom Yamas]

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[Lester Holt]

No one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try.

[Bowen Yang]

She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for.

[Lester Holt]

If you have a case you'd like.

[Tom Yamas]

Me to look into, call the Helen Gone murder line at 678-744-6145.

[James Stout]

Listen to Helen Gone Murderline on the.

[Tom Yamas]

Iheartradio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[James Stout]

The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much and women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe with guests like Corinne Stephens.

[Matt Rogers]

I've never seen so many women protect predators.

[Lester Holt]

And then me too happened, and then.

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Everybody else want to get pissed off because the white said it was okay.

[James Stout]

Problem.

[Matt Rogers]

My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was doing.

[Tom Yamas]

She was like, oh, dad, all they.

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Were doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school.

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And Slumflower.

[Lester Holt]

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You actually sent it.

[James Stout]

Listen to the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect podcast network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast.

[Lester Holt]

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James Today, and I am lucky to be joined again by Mick. We're gonna talk today about Libya. And just like right off the top, top, this is gonna be a sad episode. Not much good happens to migrants in Libya. A lot of bad stuff happens. And if you someone who prefers not to hear about, like, violence or sexual violence or incarceration, it's probably some other stuff I'm overlooking. This might not be the episode for you, and that's fine. But, Mick, how you doing?

[Matt Rogers]

Hi, James. I'm good, I'm good.

[Lester Holt]

That was an uplifting intro, wasn't it? I felt like that was a really positive way to start the show.

[Matt Rogers]

Yes, definitely, definitely. But probably Very warranted because it's not going to be a fun episode. There's torture, there's imprisonment, there's enslavement. It's horrible. Libya is probably one of the worst countries in the world to be a migrant at the moment, if not the worst.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. And you have a whole industry, a whole part of their economy that is predicated on enslaving migrants lately selling people and all of the other kinds of violence that come from that.

[Matt Rogers]

Exactly. There's, I think, over 20 or 30 different facilities with varying degrees of government involvement in those facilities. And it's very hard to pinpoint exactly, like where does the government end and where does this, this human trafficking business begin?

[Charles McBride]

Right.

[Matt Rogers]

Similar to like early mid Soviet Union where there was so much organized crime happening within the government that it was also impossible to distinguish, like, where one began and where the other ended.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, like which was which.

[Matt Rogers]

Exactly. It was under bresnev, I think. But don't, don't quote me on that.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, so, yeah, so give us a low download first of all, maybe, I guess, if people have been not listening, why are we talking about Libya?

[Matt Rogers]

Well, on May 8, it was reported that the Trump administration was considering deporting migrants to this North African country, which is a new low. The bar is buried and these motherfuckers just grabbed a shovel. I don't think it's possible to exaggerate just how cruel this would be if it were to happen. As I said earlier, Libya is probably the worst country in the world to be a migrant at the moment. And to illustrate that, I'm going to briefly quote from this 2022Amnesty International article. Men, women and children returned to Libya. Returned in this case meaning that they tried to cross the Mediterranean and were picked up by the Libyan Coast Guard. Return to Libya, face arbitrary detention, torture, cruel and inhumane detention conditions, rape and sexual violence, extortion, forced labor and unlawful killings. Instead of addressing this human rights crisis, the Libyan Government of National Unity, now called the gnu, continues to facilitate further abuses and entrench impunity, as illustrated by its recent appointment of Mohamed Al Koha as Director of the Department for Combating Illegal Migration, which we will be referring to as the DCIM from now on. To make that entire list somehow worse, there has been extensive documentation from human rights groups that strongly suggest that the DCIM works together with non governmental militias, making the latter responsible for at least six unofficial detention centers, although it is reasonable to assume that there might be more.

[Lester Holt]

So reporting out of Libya is hard to understate.

[Matt Rogers]

It yes.

[Lester Holt]

Sally Hayden has an excellent book called My Fourth Time We Drowned. That, like, one of the things I like about it is it explains, like, her journalistic process. And it's people who are detained in places where they can't get out clubbing together to get one message out on the one phone that one person smuggled in, in parts.

[Charles McBride]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

Like someone had the battery, someone had screen or whatever and someone else had a SIM card. And like, that way they could. They could get a message out. But it's everything that we hear about. We can assume that there is probably a lot more of it happening that we haven't heard about, or at least some more of it happening that we haven't heard about.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. The worst part about this is that it's knowing that it's probably worse and it's probably more extensive than we know, because. Yeah. As you said, Libya is a hard country that. To do this kind of reporting. And I am assuming that it's not very safe for journalists to just go there and go talk to people.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah. And like, at the end of the day, you're not as. As I'm sure you'll explain, you're not just with the Libyan government, you're fucking with the. The European Union is absolutely complicit in this. And, like, they ain't coming to save you.

[Matt Rogers]

We'll get to that. How the EU is complicit in both funding and energy actions.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

So, but let's first get this all into the proper context. We're going to dive a bit into the history of Libya because that plays a major part in how this situation is right now.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

So we'll start by talking about the former dictator Muammar Gaddafi. He took control of Libya through a military coup d' etat and ruled it from 1969 up until he faced mob justice in the Libyan Civil War in 2011. He is or was accused of human rights violations and cracking down hard on dissent and opposition. Initially, he was on the list of states which sponsored terrorism, but from 2004 onwards, he slowly began to rekindle ties with a number of countries, with one of the main champions for rehabilitation being Italy, the former colonial power that had occupied Libya. So to no one's surprise, we're bringing in colonialism here. Year now, James, you get three guesses as to what one of the cooperations was between Libya and Italy.

[Lester Holt]

Well, I could guess many things. Right. There's some stories about Gaddafi and Berlusconi, but we won't talk about those. Was it preventing Migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

[Matt Rogers]

Yes, that, that is true.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. Something the Italians love to do.

[Matt Rogers]

It was happening back then as well. Well, yeah, it's a really weird relationship between Italy and Libya that's also kind of fascinating. But then we're going to get all the way off topic if we dive into that.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

So somewhere between 2004 and 2005, Libya was supplied with money and equipment to help stem the flow of illegal migration coming from Africa. Gaddafi himself said in 2010 that this was to prevent the loss of European cultural identity to a new black Europa after Libya was paid 50 million Euro for this purpose that same year.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah. Based anti colonial.

[Matt Rogers]

Yes.

[Lester Holt]

I'm sure there's a Gaddafi did nothing wrong movement that exists on some corner of Reddit that I haven't.

[Matt Rogers]

Oh God.

[Lester Holt]

Plummeted into yet. But yeah, this, this guy was a turd.

[Matt Rogers]

I cannot find a stick long enough that I would touch that community with, to be honest. But that's also something that plays in here and that I think if you read a lot of human rights reports, you come across it. But there's also like a distinct form of racism for sub Saharan or like Eastern African people.

[Lester Holt]

Definitely.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

That's also going to play into this. And it's just a smorgasbord of bad stuff.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. I mean, for people who perhaps grew up in the United States, you know, felt of their own, received very little education in school about African geography and politics, like, this can be hard to grasp.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

Like, Africa is, is sometimes perceived as a country, not a continent, in sort of discourse in the United States. And that's again, like, that's not people's fault. Like, it's a nature of our education system failing people. But yeah, if you're not familiar. Right. Olivia is of course in North Africa and like, great replacement style racist conspiracies absolutely exist in North Africa about people from sub Saharan Africa, I. E. That the parts of Africa that are beneath the Sahara Desert and in the there. Which you can find by looking at the map. But yeah, like, just because this is in Africa, like, racist is absolutely going down.

[Matt Rogers]

No, I, I think it was highlighted a bit when the president or prime minister of Tunisia was cracking down on migration, that there was also like a very distinct racism against. Against sub Saharan Africans.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, but it is, it's a global thing because racist is a social construct and it's not like, like an inherent thing that, that you, you'll hear this a lot. You know, I've worked in Hispaniola a lot.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

The island that contains Haitian Dominican Republic, the island which receives millions of dollars from the United States to reinforce the border between the two nations that make it up. You will hear this reference to Haitian people as black from Afro Caribbean Dominican people. Right. And this idea that, like, there's this racial distinction between the two that is the nature of race. Right. It's a social construct that can be mobilized to create a power dynam.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. That is. That's a whole nother topic of discussion. Because identity and race are so intermingled but also so fluid.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

That you could talk for hours about it. But that's not why we're here. Yeah. Warming up ties with Libya was a pragmatic approach from the EU as it lies just on the doorstep of Fortress Europe, but also marked at the start of said fortress to start externalizing its borders into Africa. Slowly working towards keeping migrants and refugees from setting foot on European soil, which would entitle them to apply for asylum.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

So even that's that. That step that's encoded in European law, we're trying to like circumvent by just making sure that they don't cross the Mediterranean.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Matt Rogers]

So sometime later, when the civil war began during the Arab Spring.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

Libyan dissidents got rid of the sex pest. That was more. More qadafi. So the world became a slightly better place after that. Currently there are two major factions fighting over power in Libya, although there are numerous other groups involved to dive into. This would probably take up most of the episode. So I will leave that aside.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

The first of the major factions is the gnu, the Government of National Unity led by Prime Minister Abdul Amit, the Daiba. He controls the northwest of Libya, including the capital Tripoli. The other faction is led by US Libyan national Khalifa Haftar, who commands the Libyan national army, or lna, who express loyalty to the elected governments and are therefore often referred to as the hor, the House of Representatives. I will try to be consistent with those acronyms, but no guarantees. Unsurprisingly, Aftar was mentioned in accusations made in 23 for his militia's treatment of migrants, with some reports indicating that. That they or he may be profiting off the smuggling. Sam, we pretty much got a warlord over there with an army at his disposal who's not disincentivized to not treat migrants as things for his own profit.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. Right.

[Matt Rogers]

Another fun fact that reveals how absolutely fucked up the situation is. The capture and subsequent release of infamous warlord Osama Al Masjid by Italy. Almasri had outstanding warrants from the International Criminal Court due to him heading the Tripoli branch of detention centers, backed by the Special Defense Force, both of which are accused of atrocities and war crimes during the civil war. He was captured in Turin after a soccer match. The ICC requested he be arrested, but the Turin based tribunal declined to prove it, after which Al Masri was released back into Libya.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Tom Brokaw]

Jesus.

[Bowen Yang]

So, yeah, great.

[Matt Rogers]

We love our icc and then not following through on it.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. Right. Like the ICC does not in fact have an army that it can send after people who completely ignore it.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. It's a body that doesn't have any power to really enforce its decisions. I know that the current Dutch Prime Minister said of Benjamin Netanyahu that they could just ignore the outstanding warrant for his arrest and Netanyahu could just visit the Netherlands, which, like, I don't even know what to say about that.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. I mean, this is the nature of what you're talking about an extent. Right. Like the ICC's rulings and all human rights only exist insofar as they are convenient to the powerful states of the world.

[Matt Rogers]

It's very much a rules for thee, but not for me kind of attitude.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, exactly.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. I find it extremely disheartening and I feel myself growing more cynical because of this world that I grew up in. And I'm slowly seeing that all the rules and all the great things that I was taught in school are kind of not. Not rules, but more like guidelines.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. That only apply to certain people. It's really heartbreaking to see, like, I mean, I've heard it a lot from people. Right. But especially from Burmese people. They really educated themselves on international law when they were going out to protest. At first they talk about the R2P, like the responsibility to Protect act, which is. It doesn't matter. It's a concept in international law that would have allowed someone to intervene and like, they just thought, this is the international law, it's the world law, so someone's going to do it. And like, nope, it, you know, over the months that they were in the streets, over the thousands of deaths that they've seen now, they've come to realize that, like, that, that that law isn't there to protect them, that there's no one who's coming to save them, them. And that's led to them building a very unique and beautiful revolution, but at the same time, it's cost thousands of innocent lives. And it's heartbreaking to see their faith being misplaced in this institution that doesn't care about them.

[Matt Rogers]

We can talk very high MIT about all these laws and whether in war or whether about refugees. But in the end, very often they just seem worth as much as the paper they're written on.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, exactly.

[Matt Rogers]

It's okay to become cynical after that realization. Yeah, so. So while the conditions for migrants were getting noticeably more horrible in the aftermath of the 2011 intervention by NATO, it was, as we said earlier, by no means the start. Gaddafi very much used migration as leverage to gain concessions and standing among European governmental bodies. Exploitation of migrants was already reported by Human Rights watch back in 2009. In a similar vein, the fact that the Libyan Coast Guard routinely picks up migrants in international waters to return them to Libya has also been documented as early as 2009. How Frontex is involved with that. We'll get to that later. These processes and dynamics were very much already in play prior to Gaddafi meeting his maker. This kidnapping of migrants, because I don't think there's a better or harsher word for it, is an explicit violation of international European and Italian law. Law non refilement, which is the principle in these laws, means that no refugee shall be returned or expelled to a territory against their will where their freedoms and life are threatened. From January 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020, Libya received 61.6 million euros as part of the European Union integrated its Border Management Assistance Mission mandate with an explicit focus on establishing state security structures in the country. Funding is meant to help stem migration to Europe through strengthening the border management, law enforcement and criminal justice systems of Libya. Emphasis is placed on disrupting the networks that operate the smuggling and trafficking of persons we already discussed. These institutions are directly or indirectly like contributing very often to the exploitation and enslavement of refugees. So that's 61 million euros that is indirectly gone through those very systems that enslave and torture people.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

Many Libya authorities often have direct links to militias or organized crime groups that engage in these practices. Authorities in the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Interior, Year, the Department to Combat Irregular Migration, the Libyan Coast Guard and the Special Deterrence Force have all been implicated. It has gotten so bad that even the Ministry of Defense employs Coast Guard units that are made up of militias who profit from these human rights abuses.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, it's fast cult to think that like you could throw some money at this problem and not just like more empower these people.

[Matt Rogers]

Yes, it's even I think when we talked last year about this, I think Rose from Migrate mentioned it. But the Libyans get paid twice because first they get paid to make sure that to return these migrants back to Libya. But then they can also get paid for selling them into slavery. What do you even say to that?

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, I think it's genuinely unfavorable for a lot of people. In 2025, people are absolutely being captured and sold into slavery like that is occurring.

[Matt Rogers]

Yes, I've read some Human Rights Watch accounts of people who were imprisoned for sometimes years and then made to work in one way or another for whoever ran that particular detention center. And the one that I'm thinking of right now, after six years, I think that person was able to buy himself away from the authorities. Then his boat was captured within 30 minutes after he got off the boat, Olivia got back to a different detention center where he spent four days. And I think after that he got another chance on a boat. And I think he was rescued by a volunteer or human rights organizations who are also patrolling the sea north of Libya.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, we've interviewed some of them talking of patrolling the seas. Maybe this is an advert for a boat.

[Matt Rogers]

Yes, there will be a Frontex ad right now for all the European listeners.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Lester Holt]

All right, we are back.

[Matt Rogers]

So we left off with just briefly mentioning how the Libyan state functions as part of this almost an organized crime syndicate that profits from the abuse of innocent people. And this is, in a way, not really surprising. Back in 85, academic Charles Tilley already argued that the states as a form of social organization, it's pretty much indistinguishable from an organized crime group. Yeah, I'll make sure that the source is in the description below if anyone is interested. But for those who don't want to read it, in very short, they're both major organizations over which you have very little control. And if you don't pay them the taxes or protection money that they want, then people will show up to break your legs. That's the two sentence explanation of that article.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

And I that after the principle of non refilement has been violated, refugees are brought to detention centers, in theory under the supervision of the dcim. In practice, this does not hold up. There are no official or verified numbers of how many centers there are or how many people are even held captive there. Libyan numbers suggest somewhere between 17 to 35 facilities holding over 7,000 people. Human rights groups have questioned these numbers and argued that the number is likely between 10,000 and 20,000 people being held captive. The reality is that we simply don't know. Yeah, we don't know exactly how many facilities there are to hold these people. And we don't Know how many people are in them. Human rights watchers or UN delegates often don't get the full picture, even if they go there to visit and inspect the places.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

There was one part of what I read where they would only be allowed during the day, but then at night is when most of the horrible stuff happens.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

So still there's very much a process of trying to not show what is being done there. People in these detention centers are held indefinitely and lack any sort of legal processes or procedures to determine their status. In fact, According to a 2019 UN report, there is no official procedure to assess asylum status in Libya. Meaning that in the legal sense, this category is absolutely meaningless. On top of that, there's also a lack of a process for exiting detainment. So that's an entire procedure that is just done at the whim of whoever happens to control that particular facility.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. And that could be someone who has just like seized it by arms from whoever controlled it last.

[Matt Rogers]

Right, Exactly. There is sometimes facilities are abandoned and they can become official. There's also been reports of the government raiding, like unofficial centers, but then recapturing those people and put them in official centers.

[Lester Holt]

Great, that'll make it better.

[Matt Rogers]

It would be funny if it wasn't so fucking horrible.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah. And then it's bleak.

[Matt Rogers]

The DCM closed down five centers that had a history of human rights violations. This act, however, had little effect on halting abuses. Reports of beatings and torture continued as some official centers closed by the DCIM quickly became unofficial sites reopened and operated by militias. For example, the Buisa official detention center in Zawiyah was ordered to close due to reports of sexual abuse taking place. He reopened a day later and operated under a new name managed by armed groups. Detainee exploitation was seamlessly transferred from official to unofficial banners, helping empower militants and criminal actors in the region. So we're now going to take a deeper look at these centers. I found an amazing article by Nadia Alday, Aaron Anfinson and Graham Anfinson in the. And James, that this is real. The Journal of Human Trafficking, which is an actual academic journal that exists.

[Lester Holt]

Jesus. Yeah, I mean, I guess, yeah, if that's a thing. Someone has written their PhD dissertation about it, so it makes sense.

[Matt Rogers]

I imagine this journal is just one or two articles and for the rest it's just pictures of Jeffrey Epstein and Andrew Tate just back to back to back. Because. Yeah, again, would would be funny if.

[Lester Holt]

It wasn't so fucking.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

I can't. I can't imagine working as the editor of the Journal of human Trafficking. It's a job that like you have, that is like the, like the special forces selection course of mental health.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

Like you, you are facing all the challenges that can be thrown at a person.

[Matt Rogers]

Oh, oh, yeah. I'm sure there's like a psychologist like on standby at that journal just to make sure. Like, like the people running it. All right, yeah. So these academics distinguish between three types of centers. Official, meaning they are run by the state insofar as that means anything, of course. Then there are the two unofficial types, which I will call semi official and officious. Semi official centers are those run partially by state forces in cooperation with local groups, militias, or other non state actors. Officious centers are those run entirely by non state forces. While conditions in official centers are air quotes better than the latter two, it's by no means a good place to be. None of these three categories are exempt from all the violence being done to people. All three have been named and implicated in abuses and violations. According to the authors, there are about 21 official sites, 12 semi official and 22 officious sites, with one reportedly being run by ISIS in Nafalia back in 2015.

[Lester Holt]

Cool.

[Matt Rogers]

ISIS had a stronghold in Libya back in the day.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, they did. Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

And the fact that ISIS might have been involved in human trafficking is the least surprising thing here.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, I mean they were trafficking people into the Islamic State, into their so called caliphate.

[Charles McBride]

Right.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. This is progress. They're now trafficking people away from it.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

This is a small victories. Of all these sites that I just mentioned, A remarkable amount is in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. Sometimes these sites overlap with areas with known prostitution rings. The researchers found at least nine such networks with the majority of the sex slaves being from sub Saharan regions and East Africa.

[Lester Holt]

Jesus.

[Matt Rogers]

They are mostly women, but it also happens to men. Libya has no laws or, or procedures to criminalize male sex trafficking. While men are still the minority. I do think it's worth mentioning.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Matt Rogers]

That that is also something that happens and most likely underreported on.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, I think it's something you'd really struggle. Like the nature of masculinity and like in its toxicity makes it hard for people to come forward to you and say this is happening to me.

[Matt Rogers]

Right, exactly. And it makes that. That process becomes even harder if there is no legal framework to stand on.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, exactly. There's like, there's nothing to say. Like this is at least you can say what's happening to you is wrong. It's perceived as A crime. Right. Like if that's not there, it says no. Like, how can I support this person? Right. Who do you direct that person to?

[Matt Rogers]

Like, exactly.

[Lester Holt]

Anybody who has been trafficked and forced into sex work. Like, and I've spoken to migrants for whom that has been the case. Like there's a great deal of stigma they had to overcome which they shouldn't have to. Like, it's not, not none of what's happened to them is their choice, but it's very difficult for them to talk about it. And it's very unlikely for them to really be able to get any form of accountability for the people who did this to them. And that's in settings outside of Libya. Like in Libya, good luck, I imagine.

[Matt Rogers]

Like, I think that's just a problem in general, not just in Libya. Yeah, it's arguably much worse in Libya.

[Lester Holt]

But Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

Even in countries that we're much more familiar with, this is happening and it's still very hard to obtain the accountability from the perpetrators that in a better world would be happening.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

So I am now going to quote from the article for the next batch of horrors. For women and girls, various degrees of sexual violence were commonplace. Facilities that did allow some NGO access, barred visitations at night. Night, which is when many severe abuses occurred. Detention center operators performed systemic rape on women and teenage girls on a nightly basis. Those that resisted were threatened with death. Others were killed by severe sexual assault and rape. Impregnations by detention center officials also occurred. So yeah, I'm going to briefly cite the accounts of someone who it has been for that.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

Afni, which is a pseudonym, an 18 year old Somali woman told me very softly that she was gang raped by smugglers multiple times near the end of the two years she spent confined in a smuggler warehouse in Kufra, released from the warehouse and dispatched to Tripoli to fend for herself. When she became pregnant, Afni gave birth to a little girl. Depending on handouts and help from strangers to survive. She told me that when she decided to attempt to sea crossing with her daughter, they ended up in another nightmarish smuggler warehouse where one of the smugglers refused to find food for her baby unless Afne had sex with him. Her daughter died when she was seven months old.

[Lester Holt]

God, what a fucking leak thing.

[Matt Rogers]

Yes. The entire article that that quote was from is like rife with crimes like this.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, right. This horrific stuff.

[Tom Yamas]

Stuff.

[Matt Rogers]

I'll make sure that it's in the notes below if, if you would want to read that.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

And absolutely no shame if people don't want to read this because it is fucked.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. You don't have to expose yourself to all this. Like, you don't have to know every detail of this to care about people. I think it's okay not to read it.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. So I want to close this particular century by just. Just brutally driving this point. Point home. But, like, women and teenage girls are being raped to death over there on a systemic level.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

And I'm fucking disgusted with the fact that the EU is still sending money there that is indirectly facilitating this.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. I mean, well, I don't care when it's high horse about, like, gender and quality and women's rights and such things. And then, like, think. Unless it's the inconvenient gender equality of migrants. Right. Or the. The rights of migrants, which.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah, I need a cigarette now.

[Lester Holt]

It's the worst thing that I deal with talking to people about work is like, people who have survived sexual violence or like, people who can reasonably expect to encounter it, and they're making this journey because they think that it's their only option anyway.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

It's.

[Matt Rogers]

It's not that people who undertake this journey to a better life that they want are unaware of the risks. It's despite the risks that they're doing it.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. And that's the same in the Americas. Right. People understand that the. You know, I mentioned this in my daring Gap episode, but very young children are subject to sexual violence, which also sometimes results in their death.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

And like. Like, they understand that that world is at such an exaggerated level of inequality that people are willing to take those risks because that's the way, the only way that they feel they can secure a safe future for their children. Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

It is a level of courage that I cannot fathom.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. Yeah, me neither.

[Matt Rogers]

The best I can do is just acknowledge that I can't fathom it. But that's also, like, a very bitter pill to swallow.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, it is. Like, I, you know, like, I. I attend wars for work sometimes. And the women who take on the migration, especially when. Not that men are not subject to sexual violence, they are, but it. It's probably more likely for women to experience it. The women who take on the migration journey alone or with their children, like, those people's bravery. Like, I can't fathom being that brave. I can't imagine how one can be that courageous, that dedicated to one child. And we. We talked in our podcast recently about Primrose, who came with her daughter. Like, that's someone I'm still, like, just in Awe of, you know, like, you don't see that kind of courage and. And dedication and just, like, ability to push through things that are horrific. With this goal in mind of reaching the United States, like, it's. I don't know, it continues to be something that I struggled to find words to express, obviously, but it's. It's really something.

[Matt Rogers]

I want to say something, but. Speech. Just speechless.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah, there's not much to say.

[Matt Rogers]

You know who else should be speechless?

[Lester Holt]

Is it the. The products and services that support this podcast?

[Matt Rogers]

Oh, I sure hope so. Just two minutes of silence.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

Hopefully this will just be a little moment for quite a contemplation for all of you out there. All right, we're back. We've. We've had a glass of water and we're going to keep doing the podcast anyway.

[Matt Rogers]

Yes. Rehydrate a bit.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

So in terms of, like, explicit accounts, that was it.

[Lester Holt]

Okay. Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

So if someone had to skip over that part, that part of the episode should be done. You can start listening again. So, as of this recording, the Missing Migrants Project, who tracks migrant deaths and those who become missing between air quotes, Approximately 32,000 people are either dead or missing and presumed dead in the Mediterranean that have been confirmed.

[Lester Holt]

Jesus.

[Matt Rogers]

The overwhelming majority of these people drowned while attempting the crossing. 2,582 of these cases were registered in 2024. Last year, roughly 70,000 people attempted a crossing, according to statistics from the European Commission. This may not appear as a lot of deaths compared to the crossings, but this figure does not take into account deaths on the journey towards the crossing. I was not able to verify how the number of 70,000 was made up, as the EU website I got it from is a collection of data from different countries and agencies who register it. What do you think is safe to assume, and let me emphasize, assume here, is that people captured by Italian, Maltese, Cypriots, or Libyan coastal authorities is included in this number. So those are people who attempted the crossing and then are taken back to Libya, possibly undertaking the journey again.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, right.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah, I know you've stressed this a few times, but a number one does not mean that it's just a single person. It can be the same person who tries to cross multiple times.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, right. People will repeat crossings. I think we reach a point where the numbers are not and not that every one of these people is a person. Right. But, like, I wouldn't be any less pissed off if it was 50,000.

[Matt Rogers]

Like, after a certain amount, it just becomes a number because. Yeah, we just can't can't imagine how many people that is.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, like we shouldn't ever have to conceive of 32,000 people drowning. Right. That's not a thing that in the 21st century that we should allow to happen as a society. And like, like, yeah, this shit, like, you know, I, I've participated mutilated along the border. I'm very familiar with death at the border, but the scale of this is unfathomable even to someone who's spent a decent amount of time across the migrant trails of the Americas. There's 2,582 deaths in a year.

[Matt Rogers]

Like that's a small village.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[Matt Rogers]

On a yearly basis. Yeah, it's a decent sized city if you take. Yeah, that 32,000 number.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah. It's like a mid sized music festival of people who didn't need to die.

[Matt Rogers]

Yes. I checked a website called Info Migrants and they estimate that the Libyan coast guard alone has returned again, air quotes around 21,000 migrants caught during a crossing attempt. So the vast majority of these people end up back in the detention centers we discussed earlier. So that's around one for every three and a half people being captured.

[Lester Holt]

Jesus. Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

There was at some point a video making the rounds and it was this African woman on a boat filmed with like a mobile phone and she was just crying and she's saying like, hey, if the Libyan coast guard shows up, I'm jumping overboard. No way am I going back there.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, I've seen that.

[Matt Rogers]

That is one of those statements that I'll immediately believe.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah. People have self immolated in those detention centers like such as their misery and their desire for the world to see them. I guess like I can understand why someone would just rather stop being so.

[Matt Rogers]

The little calculation I just made that leaves us with 49,000 people making the crossing, of which 2,582 died, resulting in 46,400 people entering Europe through the Libyan routes. Again, these are approximations, more exact numbers we'll never know. I tried to track money and expenditures a tiny bit to see how the EU is dealing with this. It's not one of my strong suits. I want to be upfront with that. But I was able to find that between 2020 and 2023 the EU granted at least 105 million euro under the European Integrated Border Management Assistance Mission. This is money that is directly going to Libya for assistance in managing our border. This number does not include money directly or indirectly given to Libya from individual member states or from the budget of the EU's border agency Frontex. The latter has seen an absolute massive increase in their budgets from around 250 billion in 2016 to over 840 billion in 2023.

[Lester Holt]

God.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

That's a vast increase.

[Matt Rogers]

Yes. And what's relatively recently been happening is that rather than have their own vessels in the sea, they are using air reconnaissance in the form of drones or other airborne vehicles, spot spot boats or dinghies with migrants and then they give that information to the Libyan Coast Guard.

[Lester Holt]

I've heard this.

[Matt Rogers]

So they can pick them up.

[Charles McBride]

Right.

[Matt Rogers]

And this is where the EU is, I would say, directly complicit in like the abuse that's happening in Libya.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, I think that's a perfectly reasonable.

[Matt Rogers]

Thing to say because we know what is likely to certainly going to happen to the people that are picked up by the Libyan Coast Guard.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

And if you're saying like, hey, Libyan Coast Guard, come over here, pick up these people, you know what's going to happen to those people, like, and it's not good. And they keep doing it. Despite it being more than a decade of evidence at this point. Abusive migrants.

[Matt Rogers]

Italy in particular, as the country receives a lot of migrants from Mediterranean crossings, is keen on helping Libya in of terms terms of training material and funding. Additional agreements between the two countries shed another uncomfortable light on the dynamic. There was first the EU, Libya, Italy, Libya memorandum of understanding signed in 2017. It saw an enhancement of military insecurity related to trying to prevent migrants from making a crossing advertently or inadvertently trying to make Libya their final stop and trap them there under the conditions that we just discussed. That agreement is a continuation of the Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation that was signed by Libya and Italy back in 28, which described the cooperation in detail vis a vis combating illegal migration from Libya to the EU. We also have the Malta Declaration from 2017 which only strengthened UN backed governmental organs within the EU, as well as a commitment to further assist Libya in training, in providing funding and technical assistance. Those are the main purposes of those agreements, which is to prevent people from passing the prestigious gates of fortress Europe, because politically we'd rather add them to the mortar with which those walls are built.

[Lester Holt]

Jesus.

[Matt Rogers]

And it is these conditions that Washington ghouls thought would be a suitable place to send migrants to who do not speak the language, know the people, have legal representation, or assumably even have the money to do anything. We've barely spoken of the civil war that is still going on there. Yeah, with like fighting in the capital of Tripoli happened like two weeks ago. We haven't spoken about any legal or law related issues that these people would invariably run into were they to be deported to Libya.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

It's the umpteenth example of colonialism, militarism from states warmongering and the transfer of problems to another place or to another generation. Very much like climate change. Actions such as these will have immense direct and ripple effects that our children and grandchildren will learn the consequences of.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

And the last bit I've added because let's hope that no one is going to be sent to Libya from, from, from the States, but I can very much imagine that those people will face the same horrors that they will have to create their own little communities just to be able to get by.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

I can imagine some people might be, might run into ISIS over there and become radicalized. We could also get like small pockets of people who, who just try to survive but are still stuck there and grow resentment. There is no real way to, to estimate what the consequences are going to be of deporting people there other than that like the cruelty is happening that Washington ghouls are aiming for.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, exactly. I think that the point is to hurt these people as much as possible at the moment and there isn't really much of a long term thought process beyond that. Like, I guess I would like to say that people were enraged at the thought of the United States sending migrants to Libya and they should be. I'm glad that they were. But they should also be enraged at the reality of the European Union doing it every single day.

[Matt Rogers]

Yes.

[Lester Holt]

Way more than 12 people. Like you should care about that too, especially if you're in Europe. Like, you know, obviously I am a person from Europe. I think there's, it's easy like for people to get this kind of smuggler social democracy kind of like, oh, look at the Americans. They're so up not saying things aren't up. Here they are. But like the EU is doing some up to migrants and like people in Europe should be in the streets about that too.

[Matt Rogers]

Definitely. This is just the biggest of all the issues. But there's also abuses and human rights violations happening in the Balkans for the people who take that crossing. There's people who try to cross through Morocco to Spain.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

Who also encounter again, not, not as bad as the things we just talked about, but by no means good.

[Lester Holt]

Yes. Definitely shouldn't be happening.

[Matt Rogers]

I don't even want to use words like good or bad because like they, they tend to lose all meaning. Yeah, like less bad. Doesn't necessarily mean good.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, it absolutely doesn't.

[Matt Rogers]

It means less worse. And yeah, there are, there are places to, to make that crossing that are less worse than Libya, but still.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

That doesn't mean that any of it is desirable.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

Or like that we should accept any of it. No, no, people should be mad about all of this.

[Matt Rogers]

And I also, I would like to, to go back a little bit about what you said about like the smok. European social democracy.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

Like that's definitely an attitude that's not uncommon.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

Among Europeans. But then again, we very often fail to look into our, our own backyards.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

And also Europe just tends to be politically a few years behind the U.S. but we've also seen a, a rise in autocratic regimes like Victor Orban.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

Massive example. Meloni and Italy is another one.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

But also in, in my own country of the Netherlands, they tried to bypass parliament in order to make a, an emergency law law to make sure that migrants wouldn't enter the Netherlands. And as we speak they're threatening to stop the, the government formation if no stricter measures against migrants are being taken.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

So it's these little seeds of like autocracy that are almost more worrying because it's these little, little steps that happen and before you know it, things are getting worse quick.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. Like anyone who pays attention to the US can see that the vehicle on which fascism was delivered to us is being delivered to us. A better way of saying it is anti migrant sentiment.

[Charles McBride]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

Like, like that is how this country built the toolkit that is now being used. And you know, the rest of the world should pay attention to that, I hope.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. We should see it as a warning sign, not as a manual.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, that's a good way putting it.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. Unfortunately it's being used as a manual by certain European governments.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. So thank you for sharing that traumatic piece for reporting with. I think that's. That's rough.

[Matt Rogers]

Yeah. I would say you're welcome if it wasn't so fucking grim to say that at the end of all that.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Matt Rogers]

No, I'm happy that I read a lot and put it together. I'm also going to have to find a puppy and cuddle the puppy for a few hours. Yeah. So, yeah, that's all I have for now.

[Lester Holt]

Great. Yeah, that's all I got to thank you very much.

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[Lester Holt]

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[Tom Yamas]

Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that was originally about the theoretical possibility of mass civil conflict and coming militarized authoritarian regime, and is now about the reality of that happening to different communities at different speeds all around the country. And right now, Los Angeles is where we're focused on. Yeah, as you've probably heard from the news or from the episode we did earlier this week, Los Angeles, California has been in a state of what the president declared insurrection. What most people would declare fairly small protests based on the overall size of the city, topping out at maybe 4 to 6,000 people on Sunday. And the president has called a National Guard. He's called in the Marines. And we called in James Stout to head up to Los Angeles and look at the Scene James?

[Lester Holt]

That's right. Yeah, hi, it's me.

[Tom Yamas]

The.

[Lester Holt]

The alternative to the United States Marine Corps. Yeah, so I've just got back from la. I was there on Monday night, obviously covering the protests. I got there mid morning I guess. But at that point the SEIU were having a rat rally. Yeah, the rally was for the release of David Huerta, who was released on bail, I believe after that, like not while the rally was going on. And from there like I basically sort of started walking around downtown la. I guess there was this really weird kind of phenomenon where you'd like go down to a place and you'd see a hundred people shouting cops, Feds, troops. Or some combination of, of the three. Right. Pretty often around the federal building, it's weird. At the front entrance, like where the entrance was, you had like a initial presence of like the front line with National Guard, with maybe it looked like it was maybe like NCOS or something. You had loaded service weapons and then other soldiers had shields in and like old school wooden baton sticks. Right. Just, just a long, long ass stick basically around the other side you had LAPD at the front and National Guard behind them. And then across the street from that you had California Highway Patrol and their riot squad. And then in another location, I think it was at City hall, you had LA sheriffs. So like literally every agency that can claim any jurisdiction, right. There was also dhsrpf, FPS, like literally every, every federal and local agency that could send cops. Sent cops. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that there were more than a thousand cops. Like maybe it was hundreds, but it was hard to get a handle on because every street you went down, every corner you turned, you ran into another wall of cops. Right. With 10 or 15 cars behind them. They were constantly driving around until, you know, I stayed until about 2 in the morning. And it's protest obviously, like as I'll explain later, kind of escalated, I guess, and then it's police violence escalated in the evening happening. You'd see these convoys of cop cars just hauling ass through downtown periodically, every hour or so, like running lights and sirens like.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

A dozen or so cop cars just booking it through downtown. Yeah, so it's very hard to get a sense of like who they are, what they were doing. They closed all the freeway entrances and exits which like I took the, I took the train up trying to be a mass transit enjoyer and it made it a nightmare to get anywhere.

[Tom Yamas]

Right, yeah, that makes sense.

[Lester Holt]

Like anyone who lives or works in downtown LA will have experienced this already. But like, it's. And then throughout the evening, right, you've got people coming up to you being like, hey, I live in Little Tokyo. I can't get back because there's a wall of cops and they keep throwing tear gas grenades. Any suggestions?

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah, I can't get home.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, like. And unfortunately, like, you know, not much we can suggest it. And then on top of that, because it's Southern California or, you know, the United States, really, people who can't afford a place to live are sleeping on the street. And they're getting tears, too, and they're getting flashbang, too. I remember, like, we were up by LAPDHQ at one point, and I seen this guy sleeping on a bench, and the cops were pushing up the street, and I was just trying to sort of take a position where I could take a photograph, you know, And I saw him sleeping, and I was like, oh, should I walk? Wait, Wake this guy. You know, I don't want him to get a nasty surprise and wake up to a wall of Robocops. And at that point, the cops opened up with whatever they were shooting at that time. 40 millimeter, 37 millimeter.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. Most of what I've heard is a mix of pepper balls and. Yeah, 40 millimeter.

[Lester Holt]

Yep.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. Grenades and rubber rounds. Some foam.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, some foam. I found some Safari Land 37 millimeter foam casings on the ground.

[Tom Yamas]

Oh, nice.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, and, yeah, mostly what it was, you know, LAPD have those green 40 millimeter launches with the eotechs on top. And that was what it. Yeah, it looks down the barrel of a few times. And so as the evening went on, right, you'd get larger groups and they'd become, like, you know, more vocal, I guess, in their protesting. At one point, people having, like, a street dance party. Occasionally people would. Would throw a firework or set off a firework, and then sporadically and like, without really any clear kind of signal, at some point, clearly, the whole area was declared a lawful assembly. I'm guessing it's very hard to actually hear when they're saying stuff on the LRAD unless it's directly, like, pointed at you. But I heard some sign, kind of lrad, Unlawful Assembly Announcement at some point. And yeah, periodically you'd come around a three corner, there'd be like a hundred, 150, 200 people protesting, right? And then the cops would toss a flashbang or a tear gas loose off a few rounds, push 30 yards, and then stop and then do that again. 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes later. And they keep doing that. And Then they push people back past these various buildings which had cops, like, stationed in place, like on the, you know, parapet of the building or in the courtyard outside, who would then also fire at them. So the protests never really got a chance to centralize people. Didn't really get a chance to centralize in one place. And, and, you know, like, to have a sense of how many numbers of protesters there were was hard because every 20 you turned, there were more people and there were more cops. So, like, it was a bit broken apart. And I think that was the goal of, of the policing operation. Right. To flood the city with cops, to shut it all down. To make it hard to get there. Yep. Make it hard to gather there.

[Tom Yamas]

I still don't get the sense, and this is what it sounds like from what you've said, that most of what is being done effectively is not the National Guard and certainly not the Marines, it's the federal and local police. And their game plan here is if they. Assuming things calm down in Los Angeles, which I think is probably the safe bet right now, every time they get over a certain threshold of protesters, a couple hundred, a thousand or so in a situation city, you know, do the same thing, right? Like deploy the military, national, or federalize the National Guard, get them out there. Right. Like, that's, that's where they're headed.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, I think so. Like, I don't know if LA will back down, to be clear. Like, L. A is a city of what, like, like 4 million people and.

[Tom Yamas]

18, 19 million in the Greater Los Angeles metro area.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, like, it's. I know, right? Like, I had these. I had good conversations with a lot of people who are out there protesting. One thing I should add, like, is that we were really well received by everyone, which was nice. Like, it wasn't the same crowd as folks I've seen in 2020. Like, no one was in black block.

[Tom Yamas]

Right. Of course.

[Lester Holt]

And then it was very young people and, like, a number of them approached. I was, for a time, I was with Charles McBride and like some other.

[Tom Yamas]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Lester Holt]

Colleagues and friends. Like, people I've known for years. Right. We, we cover the same kind of. And people will come up to us and just be like, hey, it's good that you guys are here. Thank you for staying here. After we got tear gassed, like, people should understand that what's happening, happening. Like, the unprompted people would, would come and say thank you. Which was nice, you know, and like, we didn't really face any, any hostility for being there. But people, when I spoke to them like there was a lot of. A lot of people I spoke to were very young and they would say that they were the citizen kid of parents who either were, you know, like permanent residents or visa holders or, you know, they're various. I'm sure some of them had undocumented parents. I can't remember speaking to anyone who said that, but I'm sure that given the numbers of people and the number of like, I'm the citizen child, so I should be here showing up for my family and my community.

[Tom Yamas]

Right? Yeah, that makes sense.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. And like, it's gonna be hard to back those people down because they were fucking angry. Yeah. A real palpable sense of like fudge. You was like very present throughout. People were also afraid. Like, it's not people who are necessarily used to this. Right. And like you said, the police response is an overwhelming use of violence.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

Indiscriminately shooting at people from what, what's.

[Tom Yamas]

The, what's the furthest distance you were seeing them at people from?

[Lester Holt]

I mean, I probably saw them taking 100 meter shots, I'm guessing, like, which.

[Tom Yamas]

Is very long range for this sort of stuff.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. I mean, so at one point when we got pushed back plus LAPDHQ there, they had the whole sort of front face of it and they let off a bunch of shots towards myself and some others. I just sort of got down behind some cover there and started filming. And then there was a group of young people who were in one of those kind of classic la. A three quarter open quad mall things.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

So they're basically in a, in a U shaped container. Right. With only one way in and one way out. And.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

There's glass stores around it. Like, you know, there's all the shopping bits people go shopping and there's pillars in the middle and the cops are just unloading from a distance of maybe 100 meters from LABD HQ, I think, into these people who are effectively like, like in a, like fish in a barrel.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

They're. They're in a, in a container where the only way out is the direction the cops are shooting from. There was a small outlet on the other side which eventually they were able to take. That meant they had to cross across like a four lane road while being shot at by the cops. And the cops just kept shooting at them there. Like it wasn't like they shot a couple of times. They clearly shot reloaded. Shot reloaded. And I was filming from the other side, but you could see these projectiles whacking out like reinforced glass in the front of these businesses. Ahead of height, not breaking the glass and falling on the ground, punching a hole straight through. You know, they get coming with serious force even at that distance. And like, those people were presenting a threat to anyone, Right. Like, like they had retreated into that building after the cops shot their first volley, and the Cubs just kept shooting at them. I saw a lot of that throughout the night. Like, it didn't seem like, you know, anyone was like, okay, now is the time for you guys to fire. You know, like, they just. Just sporadically potshots throughout the evening.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. Well, we're gonna continue talking about what's going on in Los Angeles and what we think is going to happen next. But first, here's some ads. And we're back. So if you read like, the manuals, these people are supposed to follow how they're supposed to utilize the riot control weapons that they use. There's a couple of things that you see. One of them is that there's supposed to be like, a bladder of escalation before which they start. Start utilizing force at range. And the other is that there's certain ways they're supposed to use these munitions. Like, for example, you're not supposed to shoot people with rubber bullets. You're supposed to bounce them off of the ground and into people because otherwise they're not really less than lethal. Yeah, yeah, we're seeing a lot of cases of people who've had at least several that I can count, I think, 3 of people having surgically removed different, like, rubber and foam rounds. And it doesn't look like they're abiding by kind of any of the rules by which. Which per their own documentation, they're supposed to practice.

[Charles McBride]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

I mean, yeah, that's what I saw. Some of them even have eotechs, like, on their launchers, which I don't know why you'd want an eotech if you were skipping it off the ground.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

I don't know. Maybe there's a different rounds they're using, but like. Yeah, yeah, the overwhelming. What I saw was just like 0 to 100. Right. Like, they'd push. They'd throw a tear gas or a flashbang. And then you just hear like, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. Yeah, there a bunch of them unloaded and like raising the 40 millimeter launcher to the shoulder and pointing it at someone two feet away, like. Like, I saw a lot of that.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

You know, we'd be going down these streets trying to find a different angle, trying to find where we could stand and, and do our jobs as press. Right. And come around the corner and just, just get a 40mm pointed at you. I didn't see any skipping off the ground.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

I did see businesses getting their windows punched out by things that the police were shooting at people like. Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

Which I'm sure will wind up getting blamed on protesters.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. I mean, I saw cnn. CNN last night was picking up foam baton rounds and being like, these are what they're throwing at the cops. Like. Yeah, like, it's just remarkable. I mean, I, I did see LASD and National Guard with rifles with magazines in the Magwell. I'm not, you know, they had a round chamber. Doesn't matter, does it?

[Tom Yamas]

No. You're a second away from chambering around. Right?

[Lester Holt]

Exactly. Yeah. I, The IDF carries with an empty chamber and hasn't stopped them killing a whole lot of people, has it?

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

The presence of lethal force was closer than I've seen before.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

Look, I'm familiar with seeing overwatch at these things, right. Someone with what you would colloquially refer to as a sniper on a rooftop. But it's not overwatch if you're just in the back of a pickup truck with an M4 war.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

An unmagnified optic. Like you're not overwatching shit. You just have lethal force right there. And I saw that a number of times, right. From the National Guard and the lasd. They did the whole lrad, like go home, this has been declared an unlawful assembly thing. But then there wasn't that kind of scaled use of force that like you say is supposed to be there. There wasn't really much in the way of like, we're going to start shooting now. And like, of course that means that if you're an unhoused person, if you've arrived late, if you're a local person just trying to get home, it's very possible you can just walk past and get tear gassed. Like at one point they were opening up and like I had been looking for a place to use the bathroom for a while because fucking Southern California. Right? Like there are no public bathrooms.

[Tom Yamas]

Yes. Which is, you know, increasingly every major city that was an issue. People got arrested by the feds for like peeing on federal property. And poor Portland.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, great.

[Tom Yamas]

When like there was really nowhere else to go.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And like some, some kindly local guy invited us into his building and asked that, you know, let us use the bathroom. But yeah, then we stepped out and suddenly we're like confronted by cops. Again, like, you know, he. I could have been someone who was there just going out to get a slice of pizza.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

The force was like, sporadic and unpredictable throughout the evening. And then as were these convoys of vehicles that would just come hauling ass through downtown. Right. Obviously. Obviously not. You know, stopping at red lights, etc. It was weird. Sometimes a green light would happen, so the cars would start going, like. And then this cop convoy would come, and some of them would turn, right. And some of them would assume the cars would stop and go straight on. And so you had this situation where the cops were nearly hitting each other. And it just, like, it seemed utterly chaotic. And I don't know what they were doing other than driving around a high speed for fun. Once they did manage to cattle some groups of people. Right. Like, they. Again, folks maybe who haven't been at these events before will not be familiar with the way these things work. But, like, the police would move in from both sides, and then suddenly you were like, oh, shit, there's nowhere to go. And then I did see them put up in a school bus to take. Presumably to detain those people and take them to process them. But, yeah, the tactics were like, I mean, it's. They're cops. It's what you expect. You know, we've both been doing this for a while. You expect them to use those weapons in a way that can inflict the most damage and harm to people. And unfortunately, like, that does seem to be happening again.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. Well, in terms of where things are right now, you know, Gavin Newsom is trying to thread the needle, it looks like, between letting the LAPD do whatever they. And he. To be fair, I don't think he has any issue with people getting fucked up with riot munitions, what to do, while also not ceding responsibility for security of his state to the federal government, which has been an interesting line for him to walk.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. I mean, his stance seems to be like, the LAPD can fuck up these kids just fine. We don't need your help.

[Tom Yamas]

Yes. Which I mean, they literally can. Like, I will say. Yeah, that's not incorrect. Right. I'm not talking at a moral level. I'm just saying, like, yes, the LAPD has sufficient force for the protests that have been. That have existed.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. I mean, the LAPD on the first nights were caught off guard, I think.

[Tom Yamas]

Right, right. And so was ice, and there was a lot of debate about. Because, like, you know, LAPD not coming in initially to support I. ICE when they got surrounded, like, and. And that's. Those are the Kind of things you get when the authorities are taken off balance. But if the numbers don't keep increasing, you know, and they have to increase pretty exponentially as they move in, you know, federal agents in the National Guard and mobilize the whole police force in a city like la, then this situation becomes basically impossible for protesters to regain the initiative. And I don't know if I'd say it's impossible right now, but unless there's some sort of like mass massive sea change is what's happening that does seem kind of like where things are going to go. And to be clear here, we're talking about primarily Compton, Paramount, some protests, and then downtown Los Angeles, some protests, a handful of city blocks and one of the largest metro areas in the entire country. Yeah, this is not Los Angeles. All collapsed, you know.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, it's not like the, the rights that occurred after, after Rodney King, right, Like, right, right.

[Tom Yamas]

Not, not even a little bit.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, no, yet. Right. Like, yeah, I mean, people are pissed off obviously. Like, like, and maybe that, you know, you'll get that sort of thing you had in Portland, right, where, where more people came as the protests continued and as more and more feds turned up. Like, there were people who might not have showed up at first just being like upset at the presence of feds in their city, I don't know. But yeah, it seems like right now that their move is to flood the city. I mean, mean, crazy volumes of cops shutting all the exits on the 110 today. Yeah, national Guard, like, the National Guard folks were mostly around the Federal Building from what I saw. But like, yeah, just a huge volume of cops and no particular plan other than a vast number of police and I guess, you know, massive detentions, massive use of, of riot munitions, massive.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

Use of violence to dissuade protest. But then I've seen, like, obviously it's interesting, right? Like, and I'm sure you've experienced this, Robert. Like, you can be like nose to the, to the grindstone in a conflict zone or at a protest and not have a clue what's happening and have to go on on Twitter or Blue sky to work out what the fuck's going on, right?

[Tom Yamas]

You can tell kind of what's happening in front of you. And even then you sometimes see something or you're looking left and the thing happens on the right and you get three different stories about what happens, happened.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, totally. And so like, you know, you know, we, we found out David TW had been released when Mia sent a message saying that, like, Right. And then likewise, folks were finding out that they'll protest in other areas of the country, which you know, is always, I think, gives a little morale boost.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

So, like, there's a chance. I mean, I'm seeing more and more. I saw a big protest in New York tonight. They can't deploy the Marines everywhere. I mean, Right. There are, there are a lot of Marines, but not that that many. I know it's in one sense, like, and I know that this is maybe a strange opinion or stance or what have you, but like, in a sense it gives me hope to see these things, like at a protest or, you know, like a big action like that. Like, I always feel kind of very cared for in, in a strange way because, like, the only thing that matters is taking care of each other. Right. And trying, trying not to get hurt. And, and then for folks who are in the street to try and remain there. Right. And like, it's quite a. Like you have this kind of disaster community. Right. The same thing that you sometimes find in conflict zones or after natural disasters. And like.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

It's always beautiful to see that. Right. Like, you know, I'm vegan and I could not find any vegan food for a while. And like, people were bringing me snacks and I thought that was really sweet. And like, you know, I saw people taking care of strangers when they got tear gassed or taking care of strangers when they get shot or like just folks who have bought snacks and like, wanted to give them to unhoused people who were there.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

So all that stuff is just a reminder that like, you know, actually, you know, if you were consuming this through the fucking New York Times, right, You'd think that people were looting and burning the city. And I didn't see anyone steal shit. I did see people take care of one of them other.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

And that's a beautiful thing. And you know, maybe people need to be in the streets to find one another right now because, you know, every, every year, people, it gets harder to go outside and easier to stay on the Internet.

[Tom Yamas]

Right. People get more atomized.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. And like, it was cool to see like young Mexican folks, young Salvadorian folks, Guatemalan, you know, people of different extractions who are now Americans in addition, obviously to their, I think, identities and backgrounds showing up and then like young black folks showing up with them and being like, yeah, you know, like the police. And like, it was cool to see maybe folks who are a little bit more liberal. Like, I definitely had folks who have, like, oh, we're not here for the Riot. We're just here for the peaceful protest in so much as, you know, no one wants to get shot in the face with a 40 millimeter, right? No, no one's there to.

[Tom Yamas]

No, absolutely not.

[Lester Holt]

And so, so it's cool to see those people making those connections and we need to make those connections now. Right? We need to talk to people and talk to each other. I didn't see people beefing with each other. I didn't really see the like optics Police. Right. If you were, again, if you were consuming this on a blue sky, which can be intolerably lib sometimes, like seeing people being like, you know, because I personally disagree with the optics of this one person's decision. The whole protest is therefore flawed.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah, the whole protest is fucked.

[Lester Holt]

And let's just let I steal their children. Like. Yeah, yeah. People were letting people be and, and, and deal with the consequences of their own actions instead of being condescending.

[Tom Yamas]

No. And I mean, I'm looking at Twitter right now where half of the comments are about someone who drove through a crowd in LA and people either this is what happens when America gets fed up or what other option did he have? You know, you're getting a mix of that sort of thing.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. Shit. Are people okay?

[Tom Yamas]

Like, because I, I'm not aware of any like serious injuries or fatalities certainly.

[Lester Holt]

But yeah, yeah, that was the other weird thing. Like vehicles throughout. I mean it's la. Everyone's driving all the time but there were vehicles like constantly just moving through.

[Tom Yamas]

Yep.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, I know it's la. Right, so people coming out to do their donuts and stuff. But like, yeah, it, it, it is a risk. Like if someone. We've shared a car bomb, Robert.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. Oh yeah, we sure did.

[Lester Holt]

I've seen a few car bombs. It always freaks me out when crowd like that and then you've got these cars around like potential for vehicular violence.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah, it's not great.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. Again, right, we have the quote unquote public safety forces deployed in massive numbers and no one's, no one's stopping that.

[Tom Yamas]

No. And you know, also just a note to people, the only realistic way to stop cars in this situation is with a barrier made of other cars. Right? Is you, you, you block off the route of march with vehicles. There's no other real realistic tool at your disposal as somebody who's a part of a protest to stop a full ass vehicle. We're going to talk a little bit more with a couple of updates from the ground and then close out. But first, here's our Last bit of ads.

[Lester Holt]

Listen, y' all. Y' all got the same last name as I. Y with the same skin color as me. Come on, man. Y family could have been taken away like my own, like somebody.

[Tom Yamas]

So we're back. And James, while you were leaving, the mayor of Lost Angeles declared a curfew in Place from 8pm to 6am for the 110 to the west, I5 to the east. Yeah. 110 to south, I5 and 110 to north. This is from the Public Safety Alert. Text it out to people in Los Angeles. So people are allowed to travel to and from work to seek or to give emergency care. EMS people are exempt. No one else is exempt as far as I'm of.

[Matt Rogers]

Aware. Aware.

[Tom Yamas]

But, yeah, that's. That's the situation. So part of why Mayor Karen Bass has issued a curfew is that it gives the police extra kind of freedom to take people into custody, right? Yeah. Oh, credentialed media are exempt.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, that's what I was told.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. People to and from work, credential media, emergency and medical personnel, law enforcement are the limited exemptions. So that's. That's what we've got going on right now.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. And if you are out there working as a journalist, like, it's important to carry your press pass, right? Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

That won't stop you from getting shot lot with impact munitions, because they've done that to a lot of people.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, you know, I had a large blue press badge on my plate carrier like I always do, and like it. Yeah. It's not to make you bulletproof now, but. Yeah, there's a curfew tonight, which, like you say, just gives them the means to. To use more coercive force and to charge people more harshly. They'll continue doing their helicopter shit.

[Charles McBride]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

They had probably four or five helicopters.

[Tom Yamas]

They really love putting them out in la. And especially now that they got the military theory.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, man, it had a real kind of Blade Runner vibe to be in this, like, dark city at night with these helicopters circling, spotlighting people from above and, like, little fires happening.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

Across the city and then occasional clouds of, like, spicy air floating towards you. I have seen some speculation that they were using some kind of other chemical irritant instead of tear gas. I think that the most likely explanation is just they were using tear gas that was old. Older.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah. It tastes different when it's older. The. The feds use is often different from the state or local police use. Like.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

You know, you get different sort of mixes, but I'm not aware, like it's, it's. I'm certain it's just tear gas, right?

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah. I think it's just a different. Yeah. Different variants and ages of tear gas. And sometimes they take on different appearances too. And they weren't really fogging the tear gas. Not that I saw. They were just tossing, tossing out the grenades. You didn't get that like wall of tear gas that you guys are familiar with in Portland?

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Lester Holt]

But it took on like the protest aesthetic. Like didn't see as many people with half masks or hard hats or goggles, any of that stuff. So like. Yeah, and in one sense people, it's, it's great to see people coming out and like engaging their right to protest.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

And coming from where they are as they are showing up to show out.

[Tom Yamas]

For something, leaving work or whatever. Yeah, yeah.

[Lester Holt]

It makes me worried for them. I've been around the block a few times and I'm worried that people are going to get fucked up. So. Yeah, it's curfew tonight.

[Tom Yamas]

It's curfew tonight. The Marine numbers are still at around 700. There's about 4,000 National Guard troops. So the number of military deployed significantly outnumbers demonstrators at this point. Mayor Karen Bass has stated that. Or the, or, sorry, the Pentagon has stated this is costing about $134 million this deployment. Deployment. So Jesus, man. Yeah, it's, it's, it's like, I'd say it's, it's not a pointless escalation. The point of the escalation is that they want to keep using the military, Right?

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, definitely.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

And to sort of establish a precedent that domestic unrest could be dealt with by the military. Which it to be clear, like by my reading is completely in, in contradiction of the Constitution.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

But a lot of things that are in contradiction of the Constitution happen, especially with police policing all the time.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

Like, yeah, like it is important not to normalize this again. Like you don't have to be like a, a blue haired antifa to be like, this is up. And I think I definitely spoke to a few people, like folks who have come out of church and stuff and just like, yeah, we heard they had sent the marines here. So yes, we just came on down because that's not okay. And that's good to see.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

And like those are conversations that people who are investors in. Not living in a country where your First Amendment rights don't matter anymore because you can get shot by an 18 year old Marine who hasn't had the time to really morally and ethically consider that decision.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

Like, it's important to have those talks with people now because, like, it is very concerning.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

You know, you and I have. Have attended a few civil wars. I don't want to be like this country spinning towards civil war. You know, I think we have a long, long way from that.

[Tom Yamas]

I mean, when, when, when the President stands in front of a bunch of men at Fort Bragg and talks about how they're using the military to restore order to an American city that's been invaded, there's no longer an argument that those comparisons are an escalation or exaggeration. Right.

[Lester Holt]

Like, yeah, hyperbolic, like. Yeah.

[Tom Yamas]

Like we're in the shit right now, folks.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, man, like, show me a thing that Assad wouldn't have said today.

[Tom Yamas]

Right, right, right. And what you don't have is an actual insurrection going on. What you don't have is anyone actually fighting the government. You have people who are, like, angry and yelling and some folks who throw through ro. You do not have a militant uprising against federal power. They're just kind of acting like it.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. If you have an insurrection in this country. This country has a shit ton of guns.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

You know, if there's an insurrection because people will be using them. Like, that's not happening.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

It's young people in the street waving flags and shouting and like, saying, fuck the police is a constitutionally protected right in this country.

[Tom Yamas]

Like, yes, it is.

[Lester Holt]

You should not get hurt for exercising your First Amendment rights. Right. But, yeah, man, like, I'm. I'm proud of all those people who showed up. I'm proud of them for taking care of each other.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

And I hope that they. They stay there. And I hope that they, you know, as they stay there, they become more. More astute.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

They learn some stuff. I saw a lot of running 200 yards away from the cops in a very straight line, straight down a straight street.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

Like. Which is not. Not the move. Right. Like, you wanna. You want to be. You want to be. I'm up. He sees me. I'm down.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah, Serpentine, serpentine.

[Lester Holt]

You do the worm. That's how. That's how you get him.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah, there is some polling out. Early polling. This is from G. Eliot Morris, formerly of 538, but conducted June 10 by YouGov of 4,309 adults. Do you approve or disapprove of deploying National Guard soldiers to the Los Angeles area to respond to protests over the federal government's immigration enforcement. 38% approve, 45% disapprove, and 19% are not sure. Do you approve or disapprove of deploying Marines to the Los Angeles area? 34% approve, 47% disapprove. Disapprove. 19% not sure. So. Man, you know, these aren't popular measures, although they're also not as unpopular as you would hope.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, that's. That's not great. I'd like to see more. I mean. Yeah, you got Tom Cotton doing his is. I forget. It was Wall Street Journal, Washington Post op ed.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

Sending the troops for real this time.

[Tom Yamas]

Oh, was that. I thought that was the Times. I think I. I forget exactly.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, they're somewhat indistinguishable these days, especially in that op Ed pages. You're right, Robert, it was the Times. No, no, that's a 2020 op ed. Oh, 2025 op ed was in the Wall Street Journal.

[Tom Yamas]

Oh, he got a new one. Okay.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, he wrote in 2020, Robert. He wrote Send in the Troops in 2025. He wrote Send in the troops, comma, for real.

[Tom Yamas]

For real. Okay, well, he got it.

[Lester Holt]

Yep. Yeah, I mean, he got what he wanted. Well done, Ranger Tom. Guy who lied about being an Army Ranger.

[Tom Yamas]

Yes. Not a Ranger Tom.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah, not a Ranger Tom. Yeah. I mean, you see this in the UK a lot. I'm very familiar with this kind of. Oh, send in the powers. Yeah, Maybe that's a good place for us to end. If you are in the US military on the National Guard, if you or someone you love is in the military of the National Guard, now is a good time to read up about Bloody Sunday.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

Happened in Ireland. And now is a good time to look at what's currently happening, what has been happening to those souls soldiers. Because it took a long time for those people to stand trial. And it's not officers who are standing trial. Right. It's soldiers. It's paratroopers in this case. Because those are always going to be the fingers on the trigger. Right?

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

And so, you know, no one knows which direction history is moving in. But, like, things don't feel morally right, you know, there are things like the GI rights hotline line, but I. I think people should be aware what happens when countries use their militaries to oppress protest. And what has happened to some of the soldiers who have been ordered to do that.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah, well, look up Bloody Sunday, folks. Maybe we'll cover that in the not too distant future because, yeah, that's. That's that's just going to get more relevant.

[Lester Holt]

Don't listen to U2 if you can avoid it, but just look it up.

[Tom Yamas]

Yeah, avoid U2. Not the song Sunday or Bloody Sunday Sunday. But yeah. All right everybody. Well, this has been. It could happen here. We will be back tomorrow. We'll see if Gavin Newsom has been arrested yet. All right. Thanks, James.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, thanks Robert.

[Tom Yamas]

That's an episode.

[Lester Holt]

Bye.

[James Stout]

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[Lester Holt]

It's that day you do something monumental or seemingly inconsequential. Start a new job, leave an old one.

[James Stout]

A big date or a small gathering, drinks with the new someone or simply.

[Bowen Yang]

A strut past an old friend.

[Lester Holt]

So celebrate in style.

[Tom Yamas]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Tom Brokaw]

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[Tom Yamas]

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[James Stout]

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[Tom Yamas]

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[James Stout]

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[Tom Yamas]

I'm Kathryn Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people.

[James Stout]

Across the country begging for help with unsolved murders.

[Bowen Yang]

I was calling about the murder of my husband. It's a cold case. They've never found her.

[Charles McBride]

And it haunts me to this day.

[Lester Holt]

The murderer is still out there.

[Tom Yamas]

Every week on Helen Gone Murder line.

[Lester Holt]

I dig into a new case, bringing.

[James Stout]

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[Tom Yamas]

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[Lester Holt]

No one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even drive.

[Matt Rogers]

She was still somebody's mother.

[Bowen Yang]

She was still Somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for.

[Lester Holt]

If you have a case you'd like.

[Tom Yamas]

Me to look into, call the Helen Gone murder line at 678-744-6145.

[James Stout]

Listen to Helen Gone Murderline on the.

[Tom Yamas]

Iheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[James Stout]

The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila, and we're the hosts of the Crowd Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much and women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe with guests like Corinne Stephens.

[Matt Rogers]

I've never seen so many women protect predatory men.

[Lester Holt]

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[Matt Rogers]

And then everybody else want to get pissed off because the white said it was okay.

[James Stout]

Problem.

[Matt Rogers]

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[Tom Yamas]

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[Bowen Yang]

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[James Stout]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Bowen Yang]

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[Lester Holt]

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[Matt Rogers]

You actually sent it.

[James Stout]

Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect podcast network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, Podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast.

[Matt Rogers]

To live and die in LA this is not a game. It is smoke bomb blast that was the data Feds came that was the day the feds came that was the day the feds live and die in LA why nothing will be the same it's smoke bomb flash that was the day the feds came that was the day the feds came that was the day the feds to live and die in LA Ain't a song we sang it's the gang banging traders we was ready when it came to us Oinky oinky piggy piggy immigration coward boy hopping out the back of black vans out in Paramount black bagging family kidnapping brought daylight stare at us daring us to fight back right they try to make us choose sides Black love, brown pride won't play when it's time to ride for west side B sides he trying to send Americans to foreign prisons you don't think he'll try to put black bodies inside Game time homie gonna meet us on Alameda I ain't scared of NER la migra we knew the trail we've been here Gon keep it peace, bruh they gonna try to bait us and instigate us but wait bruh take it to their faces Spread ain't masculine, it's paper thin we work for the border we just following orders but fear overtakes them Badges a facade we exercise our rights they send National Guard and one thing's for certain Burn down the regime when the President chooses to send the marine die in LA hey, this is not a game it is smoke bomb flash that was the day the feds came that was the day the feds came that was the day the feds live and die in LA why nothing will be the same it's smoke bomb blast that was the data feds came that was the data feds came.

[Tom Yamas]

That was the data feds came this.

[Tom Brokaw]

Is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong and James Stout. This episode, we are covering the week of June 4th to June 11th, 7th. Let's start, James, with an update on the protests happening in LA in response to mass ICE raids in the Los Angeles area and also around the country.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, so I've been in la. I was up there covering it. I'm back home now. It's on Wednesday. We did a whole episode about this that people can listen to. In terms of updates, I think things were a little bit smaller tonight. There were a large number of detentions made by tonight. You mean last night? Tuesday night.

[Tom Brokaw]

Tuesday night.

[Lester Holt]

Okay. Yeah. To summarize, right, the first two nights saw the city caught off guard.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, the weekend was pretty spicy.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, it got. It got pretty wild out there. A couple of cop cars got destroyed. I think some wayos made the ultimate sacrifice rip.

[Tom Brokaw]

Waymo.

[Lester Holt]

Yep. Oh, I saw them trucking the way Mos out and there was not much Waymo left. Like it was the cremains of the Waymo passed me gone.

[Tom Brokaw]

But not for gun.

[Lester Holt]

So by Monday morning, they had flooded Los Angeles with police. I saw police from LAPD, LASD. I saw police from FPS, DHS, National Guard, CA Highway Patrol. It's like Pokemon for cops up there. And that resulted in. In them splitting up protesters, kettling and. And detaining people on Monday night. Yeah, and they made extremely liberal use of impact Munitions, chemical irritants, et cetera. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Thousands of impact munitions that you can find casings all over dtla. If you just go walk around. I saw a lot of, like, people had tagged up a lot of buildings in dtla, but from what I've seen, I don't know. We'll see. Right. It's also the week, so maybe things will get bigger again over the weekend.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah. Things can get less combative during the week because people are busy with work and keeping themselves, like, fed and housed. And then on the weekend, things can sometimes open back up again.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

And also, it's worth. It's worth noting how these. How these specific protests are flaring up, which is that, like, these ones are flaring up when ice, like, drags people out of a place.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Tom Brokaw]

It is directly in response to ICE kidnapping their neighbors.

[Lester Holt]

Right.

[Bowen Yang]

And so, you know, the next time ICE does a bunch of kidnappings of people, there's a chance that it will pop off again because. Because people are being like, holy shit, don't take my neighbor away.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Tom Brokaw]

And the LA protests are already happening in a sequence. Right. We had stuff happening in San Diego. We then had stuff in Minneapolis. We then had stuff in Chicago. We then had the really big flare, which was la. And I think what's interesting right now is that instead of having just like, nationwide riots like there was in 2020, this is more like a sequence that actually directly follows the actions of ice. And in some ways, I think this can be harder to combat if.

[Lester Holt]

If every.

[Tom Brokaw]

Every city has the capacity to do what LA has done in response to the actions of ICE that follow the actions of ice. That could be harder to prepare for than just the federal government realizing that we have to do massive counterinsurgency everywhere, all at the same time, like what happened in 2020. If instead this is a rolling sequence of protests that happen directly in response to ICE actions, any city could be next. Instead of just trying to prepare for nationwide riots, they have to be this more like, mobile, fluid force. They have to respond to different outbursts that happen in different cities at different times. And I think the other advantage that this model has is that the actual protesters themselves can also iterate on tactics instead of trying to reinvent the wheel every time. You can take what happened in a previous city, like a week ago, two weeks ago, and iterate on that. Iterate on what was unsuccessfully, what captured attention and what was able to catch the cops off guard, minimizing mass. Mass arrests.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. In terms of the state response, just in Case people have missed it, right? 2,000 National Guard troops, 700 United States Marines. The Marines weirdly came from 29 palms. I know the Corps has like an urban warfare school or at least had one there in 29 palms. Obviously camp Pendleton is a bigger base actually. Might not be geographic, they're both huge and closer to LA, but they sent them from 29 palms instead. I didn't see any Marines. They're just supposed to be protecting federal assets. They're not supposed to be out there like straight up policing. Obviously that's, you know, unconstitutional. One can make a case that it's unconstitutional to be deploying them at all in this fashion.

[Tom Brokaw]

There is some on the streets now. National Guard is actually making arrests on the street. Marines have not as of Wednesday, but some of the Marines have been deployed. There's upwards of 700 who are like in the process of being deployed to LA streets right now out of 2,000 available troops, some of which are actually still receiving troops training on standard rules of force. So these people do not have necessarily like extensive training on police crowd control, but are currently brushing up on crowd control tactics.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, what I saw from National Guard was like it seemed to be by rank, although I'm not certain of that. Guys with, with shields and sticks, right? Just straight up poles as opposed to like truncheons with like a T shape or an L shape or whatever. And then probably one in every five or six had an M4 with a magazine. Magazine. That's a gun for people who aren't familiar. It's an AR15 and that's obviously live ammunition. So like they didn't seem to have any access to like less lethals or they didn't bring them if they did. But I don't know about Marines and obviously we saw like police using less lethals. And then LASD also had some cops with M4s amongst their formations.

[Tom Brokaw]

And this is just about to like really expand. Outside of LA and California, amidst anti ICE protests across Texas, Governor Greg Abbott just deployed the Texas National Guard. And on Tuesday night, I believe MSNBC broke the story that ICE is about to send Special Response team, quote, unquote, tactical units to five Democrat controlled areas, namely New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia and Northern Virginia.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, SRT is like a SWAT team if you're not familiar. Like we. There was a DHS SRT that ended up responding to that south park protest in San Diego that we mentioned last week or the week before.

[Tom Brokaw]

As of Wednesday, there's already been protests this week in over half US States. This will certainly continue throughout the weekend, at least for LA. On Tuesday night, the mayor announced an 8pm curfew in downtown Los Angeles. There were mass arrests Tuesday night, hundreds of people. I think the other advantage that this kind of rolling sequence model that we've seen for like San Diego, Minneapolis, Chicago, Louisiana is that not only does it give people time to like iterate on tactics, it also gives people a break. If anyone who survived 2020, you know how, how intense burnout can be from just doing that all the time.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Tom Brokaw]

And having built in breaks where you can like recover physically and mentally while iterating on tactics, that could be interesting to see.

[Bowen Yang]

I think also there's one thing we should note about this, which is that like there's a very, very clear actual thing you're trying to do here, which is stop them from taking these people. And even if you fail to immediately take someone, like stop them taking someone in the moment, every single like second they're having to do, dealing with this shit is means that they're not doing it. Yeah. So you're degrading their capacity.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, exactly. Time is like the most valuable asset here.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. And like, obviously again, like the larger goals we want to like expel, like, you know, like one of the most common things I'm hearing from people is just like ICE out of the city.

[Tom Yamas]

Right.

[Bowen Yang]

Like we don't want them to be fucking doing the, these raids. But every, every time they're forced to like actually face resistance when they're doing a raid, makes it much, much harder for them to do it. They have to start planning for there to be resistance to the rage, which slows them down. And yeah, everything you could do to, to put wrenches into the gears until the machine breaks is, is good. And there's a, there's a very clear path from A to B to C in a way that there kind of aren't. Like it doesn't rely on politicians doing stuff, it just relies on us stopping them. So.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah. Talking of politicians doing stuff, the city of Glendale did cancel its detention contract with ice, Right. So they won't be detaining people there. So like a little bit of progress there. And Gavin Newsom has said some shit about the deployment of the National Guard and California has filed a court case. Like Newsom has not done everything in his power to stop that. But Gavin Newsom, what do you expect? I'll be back in LA if things continue then there. But it's certainly the biggest protest we've seen this time around in the Trump Administration.

[Tom Brokaw]

All right, let's go on break and come back to discuss more news.

[Lester Holt]

We are back. And Unlike people from 12 countries who will not be coming back to the United States for the foreseeable future because the Trump administration has announced a new travel ban, the form of the travel ban is basically anyone who applies for a visa or is in the process of applying for a visa currently, if they are from one of these 12 countries, is unable to obtain a visa to the United states. Right. The 12 countries, seven have partial restrictions and then the full band is on Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. And then Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela have like a higher barrier. Right. And some visas are not available to them.

[Tom Brokaw]

Myanmar is an interesting inclusion there.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, it is. They looked at two criteria, it seems, right, because Trump made an executive order at the start of his presidency, like looking to identify countries for travel ban. The. The two criteria they had were visa overstay percentages and the quote, unquote, not having a competent central authority to, to cooperate with on vetting. Right. So like, you can't do a background check on someone if their country doesn't have that facility. It's a claim. Right. I think they got Myanmar on visa. Overstay percentages. It's worth noting, right, that they, they use percentages and not raw numbers for a reason. Because, yeah, a certain percentage of Burmese people may overstay their visa. I think it's 27.1%. That amounts to 543 individuals. If we look at, for instance, France, these are 20, 23 numbers. About 0.6% of French people overstay their visa, that amounts to 9,182 individuals. Right. So like, a percentage is great, but if a big percentage of a small thing is still a small thing. Yeah. This is how they're attempting to justify it, though, in, in terms of bulletproofing it through the courts. Obviously they didn't have the best luck with their travel ban in the first administration. So using this tactic is, is one that they're hoping will justify it. Will, will stick the landing through, through the courts. I should add that they have some exemptions. Right. Existing visa holders who are currently within the United States can remain in the United States. Right. In practice, lots of these countries only get single entry visas, so it might be hard for them to leave and come back. But it's sometimes it. I've heard it reported that, like, all these people, like people from these countries can no longer come to The United States or be in the United States. And that's not true. There are exemptions for people who are dual citizens. There are exemptions for adoptive children. There are exemptions for ethnic and religious minorities in Iran. There are exemptions for sports teams because the United States. Interesting. Well, the United States is holding the World cup and the Olympics, right? Yeah. Like, it would be something of a farcical spectacle if, you know, 19 countries were not represented. I mean, the Olympic Games is something of a farcical spectacle to begin with, one could argue. But, yeah, they didn't want that. Right. They didn't want that, like, international spectacle. So a professional athlete visa is hard to get at the best of times. So, like, that is a high bar. But those ones still seem to be available. And then there's also exemptions for siv, Right. Special Immigrant Visas. These are people who've worked closely with the United States. The vast bulk of them will be Afghan people, people who worked as interpreters or otherwise cooperated with the United states during the 20 years the United States was at war in Afghanistan. Again, I've seen that misreported, including by people who really should know better. But, you know, I'm never not disappointed in a lot of people's immigration coverage. This will be challenged in court.

[Charles McBride]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

But I think they have gone some way to trying to make this a bit more bulletproof than they did before for. And it is concerning that they seem to have a better chance, obviously. Pretty concerning, especially for us, with our extensive reporting on Burma or Myanmar, that those people can't come here and be safe. Yeah. That's a travel ban in a nutshell, I guess.

[Bowen Yang]

Also, I think it's worth noting. So this is just an expanded version. Well, I guess it's a little bit of differences, but it's basically an expanded version of the Muslim ban from his first term.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. With some new countries and I think maybe the removal of some countries from previous. Previously.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. And, like, it's worth noting that, like, in Trump, one like, that immediately caused the airport protests, which were, like, the first big protests of the administration that were extremely effective until people, like, went home. And this time it's basically not been a news story because we're so far along that the protests have been about, like, ice is dragging our neighbors away. And. Yeah, I just think that's bad as shit. And also, the airport protect protests, like, were really effective.

[Lester Holt]

They were some of the more effective protests in those years. Yeah. Yeah, I am.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

I did see a flyer for an airport protest, but I'VE seen no. No evidence of ones occurring.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, I, I had heard that there was going to be one on Monday, but that it just like, didn't happen. So I don't know what's going on with that. Yeah, but that was a thing that was pretty effective. And they also didn't beat the shirt of everyone for most of it, which was nice.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, Mia, talking of beats, how about we drop some beats right now with this sick tariff song?

[Tom Brokaw]

Great work, James.

[Lester Holt]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Bowen Yang]

So Donald Trump has apparently, according to him, resolved the trade war with China. He's claiming the negotiation.

[Tom Brokaw]

We won.

[Bowen Yang]

He's claiming victory.

[Tom Brokaw]

Mission accomplished.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, the claim that he's making out of the, out of the London negotiations. And I want to point out that I have not heard anything from the Chinese side. It's possible there'll be stuff on the Chinese side by the time this episode comes out. It's possible this whole deal will have collapsed by the time this comes out. It seems like the deal is that the US maintains tariffs at 55%, which is what they're at right now. China maintains 10% tariffs, and then China ensures US access to rare earth metals and then the US does. Trump was talking about the US not actually doing a crackdown on, like, Chinese international students, so who knows what the fuck is going to happen with any of the. That. That is the reporting that's coming out right now. I don't know. Quite frankly, I am skeptical this is going to hold. I, again, like, I don't, I don't know if, like, in two days when this episode comes out, if any of this is going to be true because again, we have heard nothing from the Chinese side. It has all been from Trump, so who the fuck knows? But yeah, that's. That, that is, that is the lead of Tariff News. This is a kind of short one. One. That's, that's what we've got.

[Tom Brokaw]

That's exciting. That's exciting that we won. Trade is back. I can go back to, to buying everything I own from teu, no problem.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, I mean, I, I can give my usual disclaimer that that 50% tariff on China is like, ruinous the global economy, et cetera, et cetera. I, I do genuinely hope that, like, the Chinese international students aren't getting cracked out on because Jesus Christ, those poor kids. All of these policies are tied together in this sort of like, unhinged, hinged, like, American nationalist project, etc.

[Tom Yamas]

Etc.

[Bowen Yang]

They're all connected. They hate us all. And yay, really, really fun Time to be a Chinese trans woman in the us.

[Tom Brokaw]

It's also fun to enjoy the COVID vaccine because we may not get it for much longer. I guess I'll do a brief update on an episode I did with Kaveh a few weeks ago. So RFK has now dismissed the entirety of the ACIP, the CDC's vaccine advisory committee that has just been completely dissolved. This happened on Tuesday. That was the big fear that Kaveh had is that if that panel gets dissolved, that, that was kind of the last line of defense with like reasonable people being in charge of COVID vaccine recommendations at the cdc. And that is gone. And just a few minutes ago RFK Jr. Announced the replacements. And I'd have not had enough time to look into all these, these guys because this was literally just 30 minutes ago. But at least half of them are at the very least what would be considered COVID vaccine skeptic.

[Bowen Yang]

Oh great.

[Tom Brokaw]

Cool right wing libertarian types. People who have been dismissed from their academic positions. Basically it's who you would expect RFK to.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Tom Brokaw]

To submit to a vaccine advisory panel at the very least. Half are like cranks. I will try to look into the rest of these guys in the future. We should probably do a full follow up episode. Episode eventually on the new panel. So not looking good on the COVID vaccine front.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. We also have very bad news from the fcc which instead of like, you know, I don't know, like I, I know crypto scams are supposed to be the SEC's thing, but I feel like the FCC also should have things for crypto SAMs. But instead of, instead of going after the crypto scams, what they're doing is they're going to hold, hold like meetings basically with what is, I'm assuming is going to be a bunch of the most unhinged G trans grifters and anti trans like hacks, frauds and violent bigots.

[Tom Brokaw]

Notably not trans people.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tom Brokaw]

They will not be included per.

[Bowen Yang]

No.

[Tom Brokaw]

Per the statement.

[Bowen Yang]

No trans people. No trans people. No, no, no, no. They're looking into ways to do like FCC investigations for like deceptive marketing practices for, for any doctor and also parents for some reason. Which. How the fuck is you going after a parent for defective marketing? I mean, what the fuck are we doing here? But anyone who like gives a child any kind of trans healthcare, I mean.

[Tom Brokaw]

Is it specifically trans healthcare or are they trying to like specify like surgical procedures? Because I've seen some like mixed reporting on this.

[Bowen Yang]

It's unclear right now the wording that I saw was so ambiguous that I think it could be anything, but I don't know. And this is, I think one of the other things it's not clear that they know right now.

[Charles McBride]

Right.

[Bowen Yang]

Like it's all just really, really up in the air what the this is going to turn into or if this is even going to turn into anything. We had that hole at the beginning of Pride. The FBI was like, hey, you can report like doctors doing like trans health care. Tier two things.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

And some of these have not really turned into anything yet.

[Tom Brokaw]

The anti woke FBI soliciting tips for people providing trans health care.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, yeah. So like I don't know, world, we'll put a pin in that one to see if some fucking horrible stuff happens out of the, out of there. But that's you know, one of the next giant anti trans things that they're doing as all of the anti immigrant stuff happens as they fucking make vaccines illegal.

[Tom Brokaw]

Like it's so much of the trans stuff specifically is like just the chilling effect. It's trying to scare people away from providing people with the health care that they need to live fulfilling lives.

[Bowen Yang]

And it's working. Like there are, there are lots of clinics that have like stopped and if, if you, if you are one of the people at these clinics, you eat well.

[Tom Brokaw]

And I think that is where people can apply pressure to.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I was going to say. Yeah. It's like there, there have been protests.

[Tom Brokaw]

You're not going to change the mind of the Trump administration on this topic at this point. But you can apply pressure to people who are feeling like they're too, they're too scared to actually provide health care and they can be reminded that no, it is their duty to provide people with health. Healthcare.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

And, and people have successfully gotten clinics to start to restart like trans healthcare for kids by just going out and protesting that. This is a, this is also just like if you're, I don't know, you're in like a blue city and you don't know immigrants and you were like, I want to do a protest. This is the thing you can do. You can find. There's one in Chicago right now that I'm blanking on the name of where there's, there's a bunch of protests. Yeah, but like you can find the clinics that are refusing to do this and you can go fucking protest them and this can and will work.

[Lester Holt]

We've spoken on the show before to healthcare workers who are like very dedicated to keeping the provision of Gender affirming care. So like if you wanna listen to more, you can hear that. You can hear how folks are organizing to protect that.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah. And all of those people are fucking heroes. Even if they probably won't be remembered as such for a long time. But they are and keep doing it and keep the fight up.

[Tom Brokaw]

Let's go on break and then return to finish up up on an exciting piece of news.

[Bowen Yang]

Hooray.

[Tom Brokaw]

Okay, we are back. So as usual, massive, massive news dropped right after we finished recording last week's executive disorder. And that is the, the E. Elon Musk Donald Trump breakup story got a lot more messy. So this is what we're going to close on possibly one of our last stinky musk segments.

[Bowen Yang]

God, I hope. Jesus Christ.

[Lester Holt]

We'll never forget you, Elon.

[Tom Brokaw]

Oh, Mia. Do you want to do, want to start us off here?

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, let's, let's start this off with. Okay, I, I have been seeing. This has kind of stopped now that Elon has kind of like run crying back to Trump.

[Tom Brokaw]

But like, we'll see.

[Bowen Yang]

There was a, there was a moment where a lot of the like, like Madden glaciers, like a lot of the sort of like reasonable Democrats or whatever were trying to be like, we should try to recruit Musk into the coalition.

[Tom Brokaw]

That was a scary moment. Yeah, yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

I want to remind everyone, this is the guy who did two Nazi salutes at the inauguration. Two. Two of them. He did one and then he did a second one. People have forgotten that he also did the second Nazi salute. Like Census administration came into office. He has spent this time destroying the federal government. He has spent this time terrorizing, rising like government employees just shutting down fucking important government institutions. Enormous numbers of people are going to die because of the things that he's done, like the shutting down USAID and particularly like the vaccine programs, the anti HIV programs. You know, like he's just been doing all of this shit for this entire time, Right? He has been just systematically looting and tearing apart anything in the US Federal government that even can remotely do anything for a person from again, everything from like HIV prevention to like destroying a bunch of the apparatus that like figures out what the weather is going to be and tells you when storms are coming. Yeah, he has been doing that.

[Tom Brokaw]

Well, Mia, the weather is woke. You can't, you can't forget the woke weather machines. Yeah, that's right. I just had a meeting with the Southeast alliance where we're deciding the weather for the next few weeks.

[Bowen Yang]

Oh my God. Make it less hot here. It's Too hot. Hot weather. Too hot.

[Tom Brokaw]

I know. Well, we have to raise the temperature. Mia. It's all, it's all part of the large scale political plan. That's right. You get it, James?

[Lester Holt]

Yeah. Follow the plan.

[Bowen Yang]

More heat, more riots. I don't know.

[Lester Holt]

That's right.

[Bowen Yang]

So, okay, it's, it's also remembering that these two were very, very close. Sort of like during this election cycle. Right. Trump was just straight up going first, buddy. Was, was, was just, I mean he just was like straight up in Philadelphia, like paying people to vote, vote through these like raffles.

[Tom Brokaw]

Elon.

[Bowen Yang]

Elon. Yeah, Elon was just like, yeah, straight up doing these. Right. Trump just like did a Tesla ad.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

It's like he just did a Tesla ad.

[Tom Brokaw]

Hey, yeah, first buddies gotta, gotta have each other's backs, you know.

[Lester Holt]

Never say that again.

[Bowen Yang]

So there, there had started to be a little bit of tension between them like as the tariffs sort of mounted because the tariffs are, you know, not good for Elon. And things kind of came to a head when Elon tried to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court election and just got his ass kicked harder than anyone I've ever seen.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

Get just absolutely thumped.

[Tom Brokaw]

And this is where the policy wonk sector of the right was starting to like side eye Elon and question his like. Yeah, yeah, Invincibility. Right. This, this, this, this, this guy that can come in and like save the Republican Party can secure every future of election. That's where that I like view of Elon started to really get called into question. Maybe this guy is kind of just a one hit wonder.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

And you can also look at a lot of the stuff that was sort of happening here in terms of like he is staggeringly unpopular. Right. Everyone fucking hates him. And like the Democratic Party did a really bad job of this. But like just like the party's base and the Tesla protests were very effective and like negative, polarizing opinion of him. Negative. People really, really dislike him.

[Tom Brokaw]

Like worldwide.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, everyone hates it.

[Bowen Yang]

He cost right wing parties, elections in countries that like.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, he's never been to staggering.

[Bowen Yang]

Like he, he, he may have accidentally saved Germany from fascism for like a decade.

[Lester Holt]

Like it's very funny, you know, critical.

[Tom Brokaw]

Support to the, to the fascist carmaker who saves Germany from fascism.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

And then so, okay, so we've, we've been coming up to like the end of his appointment as like, what the fuck is the name of the term?

[Tom Brokaw]

Special government employee.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, special government employee. Oh, it was special. I was going to say that. And I was like, it can't be called special government employee.

[Tom Brokaw]

We call it a siji.

[Lester Holt]

Ski Ski. Gay.

[Tom Brokaw]

Well, James, you can't say that.

[Bowen Yang]

No, no, you can't.

[Lester Holt]

I've been cancelled.

[Bowen Yang]

But there was always a question of, like, what exactly his role is going to be going forward once his time as a special government employee, like, ran out.

[Charles McBride]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

But then he leaves with Stephen Miller's wife.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

So as, as we've reported in previous episodes, but the final break came over the weekend over the budget, Big, beautiful budget. And Elon has been pissed off at this budget for like a while. And over the weekend he, he finally starts straight up doing like, kill the budget posting and telling people to like, call their senators to kill the budget instead of just saying it's bad. And this is I think actually an important thing to note here, like, like.

[Tom Brokaw]

Actively campaigning against the budget. But Bill. And yeah, yeah, which is essentially Trump's like, core policy at this point. It's like the way to, the way to push through a whole bunch of the stuff that he can't just do himself as president is just Trojan horsed through this budget.

[Lester Holt]

Bill. Yeah, yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

And, and, and, and this gets to, I think, something that's like a, a kind of important split in, in the Republican Party right now about this budget, which is that like, Musk is a, is a budget deficit true believer. Right. Like, yes, he and his ghouls are trying to destroy the federal government because, like, ideologically they don't think it should really exist except for like, as a tool to hand them money and as a tool to like, shoot people who they don't like. But he is part of this cadre of tech people and this is very, very common in these tech circles. You see this in some finance circles of these people who believe that the US Is about to like, enter like the super Great Depression because the, the amount of the GDP being spent on debt payments is too high. And so they think if they don't like, stop this right now. And this is partially why they were trying to like, crash the economy, because they thought that if you crash the economy and you did all this tariff stuff or like, whatever, it would, it would decrease the cost of US borrowing. Now that didn't happen. Right. The interest rates of the bond shot up because everyone was like, holy fuck, these like, absolute maniacs aren't going to pay their debt. So, you know, none of this shit is working. But they are like true believers on this.

[Lester Holt]

Right?

[Bowen Yang]

And this is, again, this is very, very, very common in tech circles. It's like these people who like, are. Are really like, oh, God, the US Is going to die unless we like, yeah, like, unless we start just like destroying the national debt.

[Tom Brokaw]

And the whole, the whole DOGE idea is built around like, terminal tech brain.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah.

[Tom Brokaw]

And it's, it's, it's trying to apply the logic of these, like, startups that are kind of scams, but try trying to apply the logic of startups to an entire government. And there was an interview in npr, NPR this week where they talked to a DOGE employee.

[Bowen Yang]

Oh, yeah, yeah. As an ex DOGE employee.

[Tom Brokaw]

And NPR asked about how much fraud and like, abuse they were actually able to find. And he said, quote, I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins. I was hoping for opportunity to cut waste, fraud and abuse. And I do believe that there is a lot of waste. There's minimal amounts of fraud and abuse, to me, feels relatively non. Existent, distant. And the reason is, I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors, and have lots of people kind of sitting around and doing nothing, unquote. So his idea that the government must be full of like, fraud and abuse is because that's just how tech companies work. And he assumed that the government works the same as a tech company. And I think Elon views this the exact same way. That's why he was doing his like, Twitter takeover stuff to the government, is he believed that's how it actually functions. And it doesn't. That's not really how the federal bureaucracy functions.

[Bowen Yang]

Like these, these, these people have just like, eaten the fucking Kool Aid. Right. Like, none of the Republicans actually believed that. Like, like the U.S. like economy functions like a pocketbook. Like, none of them believe that because it's not true. Right. Like, you don't print your own money. So of course the US Government doesn't functions like, like a pocketbook. But, like, this is the generation of people where like, the people who are just so absolutely pilled on the ideology have taken over. But on the other hand, there is Trump, and Trump doesn't give a fuck about any of this. Right. Like, the faction that Trump here is representing is the faction of capitalists who just wants tax cuts. You don't give a fuck about like, all of this weird tech brain stuff. Like, they elected Trump with the mandate of handing them trillions of dollars in these former tax cuts. And that's all they care about. And we're getting a giant conflict between them because as, as much as, as Trump has just sort of been like lying about the budget numbers or whatever the fuck, if you're one of these actual budget locked people, you can just look at the budget and go, this is going to increase the debt by like $2 trillion or whatever the fuck, right? And it's revealed a sort of pre existing source of tension inside of the base between the sort of tech people and a lot of the rest of sectors of capital which aren't as ideologically pilled. So let's get in to all of the actual shit because it's very funny. So Business Insider put together a really good minute by minute timeline if you want to do that. I'm not going through this minute by minute.

[Tom Brokaw]

Like, I'm not gonna go through minute by minute. I am, I am gonna go through tweet by tweet.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tom Brokaw]

Because we have to talk about the tweets. The first time I've ever really wanted to say that.

[Bowen Yang]

Oh, they're so good.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, the first big tweet. And this was, you know, a month amongst Elon crashing out about the budget bill and talking about how he's going to cancel certain SpaceX. SpaceX projects. But the first big tweet from Elon was time to drop the really big bomb at real. Donald Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, Donald J. Trump. Mark this post to the future. The truth will come out. So this is, this is the really good big one. As Elon says, the really big bomb.

[Bowen Yang]

I actually think this in the long run could be one of the most important aspects of this entire fight because the right is incredibly conspiracy brained. They've all been like hyped up on this like Epstein pill shit and like, like specifically on like the Trump's gonna release the Epstein files and show all the Democrats, right? But they've always had like this psychological block about talking about the fact that like Trump and Episode Epstein are the most connected motherfuckers anyone's ever been. I'm going to read there's a very famous quote from a New York magazine article that's like Trump talking to a bunch of people at like a meeting. Quote, I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. Trump booms from a speakerphone. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do. And many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it. Jeffrey enjoys his social life. So like, he knew, right? He was friends for ages. Yeah. Some 2002. Like he's, he's on Epstein's fucking plane. Like he is.

[Tom Brokaw]

Like, everyone knows this, right? Like everyone except everyone knows this, right? Everyone except for like the weirdo QAnon, right. Understands this. And some of the people try to justify this as being like, no, Trump was like, you know, a deep mole, a deep plant who got in close with, with Epstein so that we could eventually round up and arrest all the Democrat pedophiles.

[Tom Yamas]

Right?

[Tom Brokaw]

That's what they try to just justify it. But now that that sort of like specific QAnon logic doesn't really exist as much on the right anymore.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tom Brokaw]

Now people just like memory hole. Especially the right. They just memory hole that, like, Trump and Epstein were best buddies.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Bowen Yang]

And, and like, and this is the thing it's been impossible to talk about on the right. You just can't do it. Right? Yeah. And suddenly Elon Musk, who is a guy who like, is capable of shifting what right wing discourse is, is suddenly like, yeah, this guy's a pedophile. I want to read this, this, this post that Trump made as response to this. Right. I miss this when this happens. I've only seen this in the Business Insider reporting. So on Truth Social, Trump's response to this was to, to post it or to truth.

[Tom Brokaw]

The truth. Thank you.

[Bowen Yang]

The thing of, of David Schoen who, who tweeted this quote, I was hired to lead Jeffrey Epstein's defense as his criminal lawyer nine days before he, he died. He sought my advice for months before that. I can authoritatively, unequivocally and definitively say he has no information to hurt President Trump. I specifically asked him.

[Tom Brokaw]

Yeah, that sounds legit.

[Bowen Yang]

This is one of the most unhinged posts I have ever seen. This genuinely, this is, this is not a joke. If you, if you are a fucking poster and you are like, what can my contribution to like the future of democracy be? You need to push this shit into the unhinged, like fucking, like the, the depths of like fucking 8chan, right? Like into, into like the fucking breeding layers of the most unhinged right wing spaces in the world. You need to be going in and just injecting this shit straight into their fucking brains. You, you need to be like, like, just, like, just, just hyping them up on the most unhinged conspiracies about Trump being like a fucking, like being a fucking Epstein guy. Because this is Completely unhinged. Like, what do you mean? His defense lawyer, who was hired nine days before he died, is supposed to have specifically asked him about Trump. And Trump's response to being called a pedophile is to go to this guy, fucking inject that shit into right wing discourse. We know 4chan does this to leftist discourse all the time and injects like the worst discourses of all time. Fucking do it to them.

[Tom Brokaw]

It is odd how this was really the first thing that breaks through this, this block on the right. You had Alex Jones, like freaking out on Twitter being, quote, God help us all.

[Lester Holt]

Yay.

[Tom Brokaw]

Kanye was freaking out. Cat Turd was crashing out on the timeline. It was really bizarre. Trump's immediate response was saying, quote, I don't mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago. This is one of the greatest bills ever presented to Congress. And then goes on to talk about how great the bill is. It's wild. You had Ian Miles Chong tweeting about Elon versus the President, who will win? My money is on Elon. Trump should be impeached and JD Vance should replace him with Elon Musk boosting this claim, saying, yes.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty funny.

[Tom Brokaw]

Something that's extremely indicative of the current cultural moment that we are at is during this spat when, when things really broke out on, on Twitter and Truth Social during, During this spat, both the Vice President of the United States and the Director of the FBI were on two separate podcasts and got to live react to this conflict.

[Lester Holt]

I know that that's very funny.

[Tom Brokaw]

Unfortunately. I am going to play the clip. I will start with JD Vance reacting with live on a podcast by someone named Theo Vaughn.

[Bowen Yang]

Here, here's, here's my basic reaction to like all this stuff is, is, look.

[Tom Yamas]

First of all, like, absolutely not.

[Bowen Yang]

Donald Trump didn't do anything wrong with Jeffrey Epstein. Like, there's the guy is whatever the Democrats and the media says about him, that's totally bs. Here's my basic, my basic read on it. First of all, I'm the Vice President to President Trump. My loyalties are always going to be with the President. And I think that Elon, he's an incredible entrepreneur. He's actually done. I think Doge was really good. This sort of effort to root out waste, fraud and abuse in our country is really good. And look, man, I'm always going to be loyal to the President. And I hope that eventually Elon kind.

[Charles McBride]

Of comes back into the fold.

[Tom Brokaw]

Maybe that's not possible now because he's gone so nuclear. Well, it's feeling.

[Bowen Yang]

I hope it is feeling to hurt.

[Tom Yamas]

Why, though? Do you know why?

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, I mean, so look, I think, number one, Elon's new to politics, right? So part of it is this guy got into politics and has suffered a lot for it. But I mean, and I get the frustration there. And I get the frustration that, I mean, look, Congress got the spending bill, but the main purpose of the bill is not actually spending or cutting spending, though it does cut a lot of spending. The main purpose of the bill is.

[Tom Brokaw]

To prevent the biggest, biggest tax increase.

[Bowen Yang]

But I understand, like, it's a good bill. It's not a perfect bill. Like the process in D.C. if you're a business leader, you probably get frustrated with that process because it's more bureaucratic, it's more slow moving. So I think there's just some frustrations there. But I really, man, I think it's a huge mistake for him to go after the President like that. And I think that if he and the President are in some blood feud, most importantly, it's going to be bad for the country tree.

[Charles McBride]

But I think it's going to be.

[Lester Holt]

I don't think it's going to be.

[Bowen Yang]

Good for Elon either.

[Tom Brokaw]

So that's J.D. vance's reaction to this. He eventually got put onto, like, damage control. We'll talk about that in a sec. What is more interesting to me is Cash Patel's reaction because Patel's been taking fire from the right for being a little bit soft on the promise of releasing the full Epstein files. Trying to downplay the extent of the files and say there's really nothing in there. That's super notable. And this has gotten him in trouble because him and people like Dan Bongino have for years made a living out of talking about how the Epstein files is going to, you know, ruin the Democratic Party. They have. They have all of this evidence, all this footage, and now that these guys are in power, they're simply not talking about this issue. And this has got some of the QAnon right upset. And Cash Patel's reaction to this is. Is frankly bad.

[Bowen Yang]

I'm not participating in any of that conversation between Elon.

[Charles McBride]

Have a nice day, djd.

[Bowen Yang]

So much dig is flown away.

[Charles McBride]

They're going back and forth about different things and. Yeah, well, he said he was disappointed in Elon.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, I told him to leave.

[Bowen Yang]

Jesus Christ. That's a crazy thing to say.

[Charles McBride]

How does he know? Does he know that Donald Trump is in the Epstein files? Does he have access to the Epstein files.

[Lester Holt]

I don't know how he would, but.

[Matt Rogers]

I'm just staying out of the Trump Elon thing. That's way out there.

[Charles McBride]

What the fuck are they doing?

[Matt Rogers]

I know my lane, and that ain't it.

[Tom Brokaw]

What do you mean this isn't your lane? You are the Director of the FBI. You are in charge of the Epstein files. This specifically is your lane. This. This one thing is actually your lane. It's unhinged. Oh, my God.

[Lester Holt]

His. His big thing now is he has to wear a hunting camo all the time. I guess that's. That's his new lane.

[Tom Brokaw]

So after the heat of this started to die down, you started to get more of the rights try to, I guess, soothe the tension. A lot of. A lot of people trying to. Trying to talk about coming together. You had right wing commentators trying to frame this as two alpha males beefing. Right.

[Lester Holt]

This is.

[Tom Brokaw]

This is just how Gary. This is just how alpha males feed you guys.

[Lester Holt]

We got to quote some of these.

[Tom Brokaw]

Because Jack Posovic famously said, some of y' all can't handle two high agency males going at it. And it really shows. This is direct communication, communication phallocentric versus indirect communication gynocentric. I understand you aren't used to it. Wonderful stuff from Posobic, as usual.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Tom Brokaw]

You also had our friends at the New Norm posting videos about trying to solve this dispute through a dancing competition. Roll the clip.

[Lester Holt]

Can't we all just get along?

[Tom Yamas]

We've got a country to say.

[Bowen Yang]

Hey.

[Tom Brokaw]

I do find it odd that a lot of people's innate reaction after the heat died down was even if Elon Musk is semi credibly accusing the president of being a pedophile, can't we just all get along together? I don't know why we can't just get along. This. This is. This is hurting the country. And Elon's like, remark about Trump being in the files is in and of itself just kind of baffling from Elon's perspective, because he was bragging in tweets about how he is responsible for Trump being elected. And Trump was then having to respond to that by claiming that they would have won the election without Elon.

[Bowen Yang]

But.

[Tom Brokaw]

But Elon was saying that without him, Trump would have lost the election right after he called him a pedophile. Which is super interesting because it's essentially Musk saying, I'm fine with making sure a pedophile gets elected president, but I draw the line at a bad spending bill.

[Tom Yamas]

Yes.

[Bowen Yang]

Yeah, that's.

[Tom Brokaw]

That's really what is too much for him. The implication is that if he didn't get essentially shafted from the White House, he just would have kept this a secret. And he's like okay with working with Trump otherwise, except for the bad bill. And maybe he's, maybe he's butthurt about Trump threatening to terminate his governmental subsidies and contracts. But like come on, Elon, this is crazy.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, yeah. Not the most well considered. It is fantastic that the richest man in the world is addicted to posting because we get some real, we get.

[Tom Brokaw]

Some, some real bangers posters, posters, madness. It never, never fails.

[Bowen Yang]

I, I gotta say though, Trump's posting response, terrible. This guy is washed. There's nothing there. He's fudgeing. Gone mentally like he could have fucking like even 2020. Trump just destroys him in one tweet. Like none of this. He's, there's nothing left there. He's just shell now.

[Tom Brokaw]

They have now been making attempts to fold the team back together. It was reported recently that actually on Friday night, which was the day after this spat on unfolded on Twitter, but a Friday night JD Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wills had a call with Elon to de escalate the conflict. Eventually Elon started deleting some of his more inflammatory tweets about the president Coward. And has now posted quote, I regret some of my posts about President Trump last week. They went too far.

[Lester Holt]

They I said the things I wasn't supposed to say.

[Tom Brokaw]

So he got a stern talking to by, by taking Katie Vance, who is, who is kind of caught in between Trump and Musk here, but has stated that his loyalties will will always lie with the President. So yeah, that is the current state of the Musk and Trump fallout. It will not be able to go back to how it was, but they might try to play nice again. I think that does it for us here at It Could Happen Here. We reported the news.

[Matt Rogers]

We reported the news.

[Tom Yamas]

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

[Bowen Yang]

It Could Happen Here is a production.

[Tom Brokaw]

Of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media.

[Bowen Yang]

Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

[Tom Brokaw]

Or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Bowen Yang]

You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in Episode Descriptions.

[Matt Rogers]

Thanks for listening.

[James Stout]

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[Bowen Yang]

You experience dad guilt.

[Matt Rogers]

I hate it wholeheartedly.

[Lester Holt]

She understands, but she still pretends she like tea.

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Happy Father's Day. The show may be called Good Moms Bad Choices, but this show isn't just for moms. We keep it real about relationships and everything in between. And yes, men are more than welcome to listen in. I knew nothing about brunch.

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She was a terrible girlfriend, but she.

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Put me on to brunch.

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To hear this and more, open your free iHeart app. Search good mom's, bad choices and listen now.

[Bowen Yang]

I know a lot of cops and.

[Lester Holt]

They get asked all the time, have.

[Charles McBride]

You ever had to shoot your good?

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Sometimes the answer is yes.

[James Stout]

But there's a company dedicated to a.

[Bowen Yang]

Future where the answer will always be no.

[Charles McBride]

This is Absolute Season one, Taser Incorporated.

[Bowen Yang]

I get right back there and it's bad.

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Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or.

[Bowen Yang]

Wherever you get your podcasts.

[Lester Holt]

I'm Clayton English.

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I'm Greg Lott and this is season.

[Bowen Yang]

Two of the War on Drugs. By last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest.

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Names in music and sports.

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This kind of star studded a little bit, man.

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We met them at their homes. We met them at the recording studios.

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Stories matter and it brings a face to them.

[Lester Holt]

It makes it real.

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It really does.

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It makes it real.

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Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs Podcast Season 2 on the.

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Iheartradio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. This is an iHeart podcast.